Episode 187 - Analysts fans of rumored iPhones, Intel loses Apple's modem business

My Experience with HomeKit and Smart Home Automation

I recently got to experience the capabilities of HomeKit, Apple's smart home automation system, by setting up a camera feed on my patio and dining room. This allowed me to control devices in each room using a single app, making it convenient to manage my space while watching the camera feed. I could turn on lights and other devices with just a tap or hold, which was really cool. The integration with Apple TV made it easy to use and enjoy my smart home setup.

One of my next big projects is converting a non-smart ceiling fan into a HomeKit-compatible ceiling fan. This will involve using various components such as a Bluetooth controller, an off-the-shelf remote kit, or an IR Blaster, depending on the solution chosen. The goal is to create a wall switch replacement that can seamlessly integrate with other HomeKit devices in the home.

One of the challenges I've encountered during this process is dealing with instability issues caused by Homebridge. While Bluetooth remote kits like the one I used have worked well, there are still some inconsistencies and limitations when it comes to controlling non-smart devices through Homebridge. However, manufacturers like iDevices seem to be working on improving their products, including developing a new wall switch replacement that will provide more reliable integration with other HomeKit devices.

The world of smart home automation has come a long way since its inception, with various companies offering innovative solutions for controlling and automating different aspects of our homes. From simple switches to complex systems, there's no shortage of options available. Some products have been met with enthusiasm, while others have left room for improvement. As the industry continues to evolve, we can expect to see more advanced features and better integration across devices.

My own experiences with HomeKit and smart home automation have taught me that it's not always easy to get everything working seamlessly together. However, with persistence and the right tools, it's possible to create a functional and user-friendly system that enhances our daily lives. By staying informed about new products and technologies, we can take advantage of the latest advancements in smart home automation.

As I move forward with my projects, I'll continue to share my experiences and insights on the world of HomeKit and smart home automation. Whether it's converting non-smart devices into smart ones or exploring new ways to integrate different components, I'm excited to see where this journey takes me.

For those interested in learning more about smart home automation and HomeKit, there are many resources available online. You can find my thoughts on various topics and projects through articles like this one, as well as by following me on social media platforms such as Twitter, where you can reach out to me with questions or comments. I'd love to hear from you and share your own experiences and insights in the world of smart home automation.

In addition to online resources, there's also a wealth of information available through email and feedback channels. If you have a question or topic you'd like to discuss, feel free to send me an email at [your email address]. I'd be happy to respond and share my thoughts on your inquiry.

Finally, don't forget to leave a review on iTunes if you've enjoyed listening to this episode of the show. Your feedback is always welcome, and it helps me know what topics and projects are worth exploring in future episodes.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome back everybody to another episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor and joining me is the esteemed Andrew O'Hara what's going on Victor I'm fantastic how are you pretty good pretty good I'm so glad that you're here and we've got all of our handsome listeners the best dressed people in in town listening to us on the podcast and I am ready to talk talk all about first of all Stitcher premium so if you haven't joined Stitcher premium yet now is the perfect time Stitcher premium gets you completely adree episodes of hundreds of shows like Comedy Bang Bang WTF with Mark Maron and how did this get made you also get 21,000 hours of exclusive content new exclusive Originals like Marvel's Wolverine and is's fruit are launching every week for Stitcher premium members and if you love podcasts you're missing out when you listen to adree episodes in Stitcher premium your favorite podcasters get paid help support support your favorite shows and join Stitcher premium today for a free month of listening go to Stitcher premium.com and use the promo code apple and you know I I want to thank one of our listeners who kind enough point out to me that I have been I've been pronouncing one of those names of those podcasts incorrectly all this time can you imagine it's uh I'm only mildly embarrassed and it's just because there are so many good podcasts out there that it is difficult to listen to even the ones that are are the most well-known and the best made and best produced we certainly try our best here and I I apologize for that so we've corrected the pronunciation now jumping right in there's there's been a conversation that we've been having on this show for going back almost 3 years now and it's been about who makes the modem inside the iPhone the modem is the part that contains the Wi-Fi radios it also contains the cellular data connection and so you know if you think back to the iPhone 4 when it was announced that iPhone 4 was going to gain compatibility with Verizon everyone knew that qualcom was going to be making the modem because Qualcomm are the people that own the patents around CDMA the technology that was used for iPhone 4 at that time that was the 3G technology that was required used by Verizon for making calls now obviously apple and Qualcomm are having a bit of a disagreement and while that's going on it Intel has been in consideration for making the modems and of course did make some of the modems for the iPhone 10 and iPhone 8 is that right yeah we we've been sitting here looking at this and thinking all along that intel was going to simply just be the the modem maker going forward and it wasn't going to be Qualcomm at this point or at least that Apple was going to reduce their business with Qualcomm until this problem's resolved and we have news that suggests that no we're all mistaken Apple will not be using Intel modems for the next iPhones and and so the news here is that apple has notified Intel they've actually let Intel know that they are not going to use a mobile modem developed by Intel in its next Generation mobile device H this is Intel Executives saying in their Communications that um further development of the modem component internally called Sunny Peak has been halted and the Intel team that's working on the product will be directed to other projects so it is very much clear that Intel is not going to be doing that that Intel Executives described apple as the Key Mobile Customer for the 5G M modem that they were developing Intel expected Apple to be the main volume driver for the product and if Apple isn't buying they aren't making now this is all from an internal document that was provided to calcalist calcalist asked Intel for comment and Intel said sorry we don't comment on matters like that we don't comment on matters pertaining to customers and apple similarly has not responded for coming Sunny Peak is a 5G Wi-Fi and Bluetooth component designed by Intel apparently intended for Apple's future phones now 5G is a real thing 5G is a huge deal what do you know about 5G Andrew I have not read I mean I know the basic gist of it I know kind of where the roll out's been happening but it's still looking like it's a little bit away but it's going to be a huge deal when it actually does get here so the the there are a couple of interesting effects that come from it first of all it it provides super high bandwidth right it's like ridiculous speeds it's yeah like mostly faster than people's home Wi-Fi will be for sure oh yeah and the the other thing that it provides is um because it has to be in a mobile device it's it's respectful of power demands we we've always had this sort of separation between cell providers and home internet providers and you know your cell provider could provide you with internet but you weren't going to use them as your only internet connection because it's just too expensive if you actually use lots of data to use your cell provider even if you have a so-called unlimited plan but in in the future where a cell carrier can provide you with a a set of speeds that are rival or surpass your home internet provider cuz remember a cable modem company even if they're using docus 3.0 or 3.1 can really only provide you with what about 350 Meg down MH yeah and it's going to be asymmetric you're going to get 350 Meg down and 100 up or something like that right if you're lucky it's not going to be a 350 350 is it no no so unless you have a a gigabit fiber connection you know you're you're not going to get it and there's some suggestion that 5G may even deliver more than that Gab fiber connection can deliver um it's it's uncertain but even so to to have a cell connection that can deliver better internet faster internet than most of the isps available in North America is a big deal would you agree oh yeah for sure I mean okay yeah so so so what happens to Comcast and spectrum and and uh all of these cable providers in that future and what happens to the cell carriers because it seems to me that all you need to do is get a cell modem for your house and use that as your router and you know your ISP business moves over to your phone business yeah I I mean I can definitely see it a lot of times as like why would you want to use your slow home Wi-Fi when you can have way faster speeds on your phone and if you could use that for the other devices in your house as long as you're able to get use a respectful amount of data or have an appropriate plan it definitely seems like the way to go for a lot of people and you're kind of consolidating you're getting rid of one thing and go to the other especially people using streaming services for their TV um Netflix Hulu Sling all that stuff lose a lot of the reason to to go with a separate you know cable company for your home now look at someone like T-Mobile and Sprint where T-Mobile has the their their zero rating plans where if you have a T-Mobile plan you want to view Netflix you can view Netflix at no hit to your data plan right yeah if you do that for your home internet service you can watch all the Netflix you want it doesn't count against your data and you you have sorted out your TV at no additional cost yeah and then you're using it kind of puts these cable companies on the run as well as anyone who's not included in that zero rating plan anyone who's not absolutely Netflix or any of those other uh streaming services yeah totally so it's it's a big deal and and it's also an equally big deal that apple is not using Intel for this this modem because that's a big hit to Intel Intel is kind of taking a beating lately right um Intel's had a huge turmoil with their CEO turnover and it's not clear whose leadership is right now is it and no not really he he just left and I don't know that there's even been a named replacement at this moment and it it seems like it's a little up in the air add to that the difficult that they've had getting chips out that are ones that Apple's been seeking to upgrade MacBook Pros for example or presumably something that they want to use in a Mac Pro that has yet to materialize um it's it's looking more and more like Intel may be something to be concerned about here now we've got a companion story that we ran about mediatech now mediatech got tapped to do the homepod Wi-Fi chip orders mediatech supplies chips for a lot of Android tablets they they make cheap laptops um I remember there was a a laptop that I picked up in Aldi and Germany at one point that uh was based on a Media Tech upset for some things um they they do a bunch of stuff a lot of cheap Android phones have have Tech processors in them so certainly they're able to make product they are getting closer to making the uh the iPhone modem is what the supply chain sources claim now obviously this is a supply chain Source it's the sources of Digi times so it's not entirely certain what exactly will happen but Media Tech they they claim is likely to provide customized Wi-Fi chips required for the homepod uh and if confirmed this mediatech would providing the same Wi-Fi and Bluetooth module that's already provide supplied for the speaker by broadcom and they could displace Intel supplies now we don't know a whole lot more than that but mediatech did reveal that they've got a 5G modem chip set that they call The Helio M70 um they claim it's developed on the 3gpp standards that it's able to transmit up to 5 gbits per second on a 5G Network and that it's a 7 nanometer process by tsmc so it's going to have reduced power consumption can you imagine having a phone that can do 5 gbits per second I would like to imagine that I would I mean if you could do that then you know it seems to me you could you could uh pretty easily come up with a router out of just an old phone and uh well rather a new phone and and an ethernet connection off of it it doesn't sound out of the Ral possibility yeah I mean that's that would be insane that'd be amazing but of course they're companies are going to supply modems like that too because like I said you know T-Mobile wants to be able to be all of your your customers right they they want you all in just as AT&T does so this is kind of huge I think we're we're sort of watching these things come together where it's going to be a changing landscape for how you get internet delivered to your house now other things that are happening that are changing is uh we have an investor note an analyst report which is revising up their shipment forecast for iPhone models in uh the late 2018 in the second half of 18 the idea here is that because there's the 6.1 in LCD iPhone that that that phone and the 6 and 1/2 in OLED iPhone are are likely to sell a lot more than they previously expected they're they're revising these shipments up by about 10% they figure it'll be uh what 80 to 90 million units of these things and that's up from 75 to 85 million units that they were originally predicting I I want to see it they think in third quarter and fourth quarter that it's going to grow year on year and reach over uh 15 to 20 million units and 60 to 70 million units year on year respectively so this is kind of cool I I think I'm also looking forward to that phone model personally I'd like to hear from our listeners if you have already sort of figured out which phone is appropriate for you which one you're looking forward to hearing more about and purchasing Andrew are you in the market for a phone upgrade um I'm always in the market for a phone upgrade Victor all the time are you looking forward to these new iPhones I I am always looking I mean even at after all this time I feel like I would start to get like you know underwhelmed and may I may not be as excited as maybe I used to be but I am still like over the moon over possible new iPhone models I always get excited about them um I'm really excited to see this lineup this year I feel like with the addition of the 10 last year it's getting very murky we're starting to wonder like okay what what are they going to name this thing are we going to have the iPhones 11s and 12s that seems unlikely there's there's so we got new models coming out even I think we saw some rumors on some new colors for iPhones possibly coming out um it's going to get kind of confusing on Which models are sticking around which ones are new what sizes there are cuz we're going to have the iPhone 10 we're going to have this new middle one that is the 6.1 in that's like between an iPhone 10 and iPhone 10 plus but it's going to have that cheaper LCD display so that's going to be like a much cheaper model but it's going to have you know a larger display in there it's going to be very interesting to see what actually comes out and what the biggest differentiators are for those for the new phones what I'm really interested to see is what the price points will be because we we had this huge controversy that we made about and and and we really did make it I mean the we we were concerned about what it would mean for Apple if they moved to the Thousand price point they did and and honestly it didn't really hurt them in any way people who wanted iPhones that weren't $1,000 bought iPhone 8 people that wanted to buy the best one they went ahead and they paid their money and no one really cared so that was that was something we were really concerned about that didn't come to pass I'm wondering what the price points will be this year because now that we know that there's $1,000 price point what does that look like for the other phones I agree is this new you know is the iPhone 10 model going to drop a little in price or are they going to keep the iPhone 10 where it is and bump up the price even higher for the plus-size model I know a lot of people that I talked with like they were already on like the like the installment plans where they're paying you know 35 37 a month or something and a lot of people I know went from the plus model to the iPhone 10 cuz really when they were looking at their monthly plans it was only a couple more dollars so they were like why stick with like you know the8 plus when I could go to the 10 which is completely new and has a whole lot of new features and better cameras and all this stuff for only a couple dollars more a month so it when it came down to like those monthly installment plans a lot of people I knew just they didn't care was a couple dollars difference and they got a much better phone in their eyes yeah are they paying those installment plans through their carrier or are they paying them through the Apple upgrade program I mean I've talked to a lot of people about it and I it's it's it's generally split I know a few people who are doing it through apple and a few people who are doing it through the actual carriers yeah I I am mixed see I wanted to do things through the Apple upgrade program and the thing that stopped me is that what what I really want is to be carrier independent I want to be able to not be not have a phone that's locked and I want to be able to move from carrier to carrier whenever I feel like it and that's not possible it was almost possible through the Apple upgrade program because if you're paying Apple then then why should anyone care but when you go to buy a phone through the Apple upgrade program they want to know right away who your carrier is yeah so it's it's um it's difficult the only way to get an unlocked phone and not be beholden to them is to still buy you know the the straight up cash only price basically or the the the onetime purchase price yep it's disappointing I was hoping that someone would lead the way on Carrier Independence but as it looks now there's just more and more lock in you know I rattled on about this a couple episodes ago where Verizon has has broken their agreement and broken the rules with the FCC and and is violating them actively by locking handsets and um they're not allowed to under the terms that they agreed when they agreed to purchase Spectrum it's frustrating as heck for me that they do this kind of consumer lock in and I I think there needs to be a way to make it all go away that's that's my personal opinion and it's it's not about net neutrality it's about customer portability you know the phone as long as you're paying off the phone why should you be beholden to the the actual service part of it because it's not subsidized I mean I guess maybe they look at it as just giving you essentially that loan on the phone you're not paying a super amount of interest on that so they want to make that up other ways by you paying for your monthly bill with them fine if you're doing that through the carrier it makes sense but if you're doing that through Apple why is this Arrangement need to exist I don't know I don't know it's it's Beyond me it annoys me it's something I'm going to have to learn about and speaking of learning udemy is the largest and most accessible online learning marketplace with the most courses teachers and opportunities for students everywhere around the globe udemy has over 65,000 courses from coding to comicbook Art available anywhere on their website and app you know I really enjoy podcasting and and listening to podcasts is a learning experience because we get to to talk about ideas I get to hear from listeners and we like that listener feedback and and this this the internet enables a lot of things that years ago wouldn't have been available to us Emy is is one of those kinds of tools that is just another part of the internet's ability to to help us learn and help us grow ourselves and our skills so you know I I have looked through the classes I have yet to take a class but I am looking at all kinds of things about iOS development and there are tons of courses there whether it's Swift or or objective c or any of the different ways that you can work to to build an app and I kind of want to do it it's been years since I've published anything on the App Store I need to go back and and figure out how this all works now and I'm I'm kind of even more excited now that there's marzipan because the the ideal ability idea of being able to to Port apps across from IOS to Mac OS is a really interesting idea to me and one we're going to talk about later on in the show now em me has something for everyone if you're not interested in developing or programming they have courses on just about anything you can possibly think of and it's available on the computer it's available on an app on the phone it's pretty much everywhere you can have access to new knowledge wherever you are so check out udemy they've helped students all over the world improve their skills their careers and their lives and they've helped me set up this exclusive offer just for you dear listener go to ud. myapple Insider right now and get 90% off when you sign up for classes there is no better price than this so sign up for classes Now using my link ud. myapple Insider and get access to lifechanging classes for 90% off make sure you download the app for your phone so you can stream your studies wherever you are that's ud. myapple Insider ud. myapple Insider and not only will you be the most handsomely dressed listener you will also be the best educated now what email service do you use Andrew you mean what client or provider if I emailed you yeah what provider would I be emailing you at what comes after the sign on your email I'm Still rocking a vintage now atm.com email address as my primary I know as your primary yeah how many outage do you get um not I say that well laughing I'm I'm kind of teasing you there yeah still works still holding on is it that's pretty cool I I have as my iCloud account I have an atme domain atme me.com yeah I have a few aliases set up so obviously there was there was the atm.com and then when it switched to the mobile me I had I at that point I created a few aliases cuz my regular email has got like numbers in it and an m and an N right next to each other which is a stupid thing whenever you try to say your email and they're like wait what were those letters yeah that's that's obnoxious yeah I created like a really easy Alias and those all got the at me domains um I don't I mean I guess I technically have some at iCloud cuz I think you can just still log in with you're you're forced basically yeah so I still have those but I still keep my my vintage one around other than my personalized domain one no no I have a I have a personalized domain I have the at mac.com and I have at me.com and I don't have any ales and I don't have letters and numbers that are bad like that in my name for that one but interestingly in 2005 when when Gmail was the new hotness and it was so hot that people were trading duct tape wallets and E strange created knick-knacks to try and convince people to give them a Gmail account because they were in short supply do you remember those days no I don't oh so oh my God in 2005 Gmail launched and it was the hottest thing ever the internet had ever seen at that time um maybe the dancing baby from Ali MCB was just as hot but but basically it was it was a cool thing to get a Gmail address and no one had them and you had to get invited into the program to get them and then you could recommend or give one other invite out and so people were trading things like like um rubber inner tube wallets wallets made out of rubber inner tube tire tire inner tube or or duct tape wallets or other creative kinds of stuff you know he man I'll give you this thing that I normally solve for 15 bucks for a Gmail address so that people could get in on Gmail addresses and it wasn't that web mail was a new thing Web Mail was invented by Hotmail which was spot by Microsoft but it was that this was Google doing it right and it really was for a long time the the best interface for web mail you could find and my email that I use primarily as a Gmail address why are we talking about this why should anyone care I don't know yeah you do you read the story the same as I did come on why why should anyone care about this stuff um in case other people happen to be uh reading your emails perhaps who would do such a thing I don't know certainly not Google for sure but maybe other app developers The Wall Street Journal published this report that says that even though Google swears up and down that they are not reading emails to create new services or app features that the bulk of emails are scanned electronically by computer software but there are no humans doing it as far as they're concerned right but app developers that are a part of Google's Gmail program are allowed to read these emails to create new services or app features and return path is a company a firm that skims emails for data of interest to marketers scanned the inboxes of over 2 million people leaving 8,000 unredacted emails to be read by its employees other marketing companies as well as app makers also have access to Gmail emails now Google's not alone in this practice Microsoft Verizon Oaths Communications which you know Verizon bought out of AOL and all that stuff also let Partners skim their user emails oath was was actually formed out of the Yahoo acquisition says access is considered on a case-by casee basis and requires explicit consent from users which is similar policies that have Microsoft has 25 and current and former employees of app developers and data companies found that the practice of reviewing email data has become really common in the industry Google told the journal that their own employees only read user emails in very specific cases where you ask us to and give us consent or where we need to for security purposes such as investigating a bug or abuse well Google lets any user revoke access to any apps at any point now I've tried to do this and when you do it you have to go to your Google account you have to go through security you have to there are like 10 steps to get at where this stuff is to revoke access to apps it's it's it's not easy it's way easy to allow it click okay it's really difficult to disallow it now in June of last year Google announced that the company would begin serving ads based on a user settings meaning that consumer Gmail accounts would not be used or scanned for ad personalization by Google but here we are and there are all these other app developers and marketing companies that are doing it for them and doing it to their own Advantage so now I'm thinking about how difficult is it to migrate my Google account especially since I'm now a Google customer for Google f and um they uh they just me a huge amount of additional space for drive and email here we are that's the thing is you know every one of these companies that is is an ad supported company at one point or other is doing things to try and optimize for that and sell the data in some way or sell access to the data in some way to create Services it's TR to say it now you if you're if you're not paying for it then you are the product the the difficult thing is figuring out how to be a delist and how to remove yourself from that situation if you so choose you know there are plenty of people that say it's fine to be the product and they're happy with that at the same time I I I think it's reasonable to be concerned about how much data you're allowing out there and how big a Target it can make of you for things in the future that that are no longer okay as they are today you know say attitudes shift and you've got your emails that that are being scanned for one thing and all of a sudden that becomes unpopular now you have to go ahead and scrub your emails or scrub your history or figure out how to undo that it's it's just an awkward situation to have that much data hanging around there and be U be open to so in the past we've run articles about deleting Facebook or deleting cleaning Facebook posts and likes and things like that I'm thinking we may have to figure out how to talk about how to migrate away from Gmail and if if I write that article which I'm strongly thinking about right now you'll find it here on Apple Insider now Andrew have you given any thought to Amazon's fire Cube I mean no I definitely have not I have not been impressed by their their Fire Sticks their other Fire TV stuff and I was like when the CU came out I was immediately underwhelmed and I was I was frankly a little bit annoyed that a lot of people were going to buy this thing because I don't know I mean I'm not trying to be biased against the Apple TV which is completely what I like and use but this thing just is not it's not peing my interest when it comes to set top boxes okay so first of all I know people that love their am Amazon Fire devices I have a fire box the first gen one I had the first gen fire stick um I have set up a bunch of second gen fire sticks for people and there are a couple of things that make fire popular for people first of all it's not a terrible interface it it does have the you know Amazon and Netflix and Hulu and Direct TV and PS View and a sling and a bunch of services that people like on them it has Alexa which if you like Alexa it's great um for a long time the fire box required the use of the button for that but if you had an Alexa device like a DOT or an echko in the house you could use those and then they added the ability finally to be able to send video by voice from the the dot or the echo to the Fire TV and that works well it took them a while to get there and took a while for to get to work very well but it does work the um the combination of the IR Blaster is a good idea I think and I like very much launching things by voice if I can just say you know hey hey Alexa and I'm sorry for trigging anyone who's got a device in the background but hi High whatever open stranger things on Netflix and having it pull up the episode and pick up where I left off that is brilliant I like that a lot and there there are reasons for this thing to exist but their implementation appears to be lacking would you agree oh definitely there there's definitely going to be positives I mean personally I don't use Alexa that much I definitely have a few Alexa devices but they seem almost more annoyances at this point as Siri has continued to grow throughout my life but there's a lot of stuff to like with Alexa and that was probably one of the main things that I was intrigued by them but everything else is just not not doing it for me not doing it for me here so here's why I would hold off on this device it it's using the same processor as the one used in the Raspberry Pi 3 and well that processor works great for a bunch of projects that I run on Raspberry Pi I I have run Cody the uh the video application on you know the media center application on Raspberry Pi using Libra which is a very light OS whose motto is something like just enough OS to run Cody basically they've stripped out everything else so that it's as fast as possible and it's still a little slow because you're asking a lot of a Raspberry Pi and so if that's the chip that they're using for this device they're asking a lot of it because they're trying to run all of Prime video they're trying to run Hulu they're trying to run Netflix and trying to IR blast and manage all of this and manage voice it's it's just too much to really ask of essentially a Raspberry Pi very much so and especially when you compare that to the Apple TV again the 4K is running that I think a10x right now which is what they're running in you know the high-end iPads that's a huge difference in in processors between the two units apps are going to take a long time to load on on Amazon Fire TV the uh the cube it's just I I think the thing to do is if this at all interests you and I think it is intriguing uh wait for a version two they're they're going to have to try and make it suitable for 4K they're going to have to try and and make it really work better they say that when you ask her to find 4K movies that it displays regular HD I I think they've got some work to do yeah and they don't they also don't upgrade any of your purchases I believe they don't do that like they did on the Apple TV when Apple came out with 4K the Apple TV they immediately upgraded any video you had that was available in 4k to 4K and they don't do that on the uh the fire Cube and even if you buy something that's the same price on iTunes you're getting an HD version a lot of the times through the fire Cube versus the Apple TV would give you 4K so even purchase it at the same price you're not even getting the same quality even though it should be capable of it yeah I have a friend who who prefers the Amazon Fire devices he has the Apple TV 4 and when he updated it to the latest IOS 11.4 on it it forgot the pairing with the remote and would not let him click past one of the initial steps that it shows you to re repair the remote he had to dig out a remote for an Apple TV 2 which had the physical remote the mechanical remote and use that press the okay button to get past the uh the steps of setting it up again before he could repair it with the Bluetooth remote he hates that thing and he's he's disappointed with the whole experience because of Siri remote for the Apple 4th gen well as we talked about last time maybe we're going to see some awesome new uh third party remotes they work with the Apple TV I hope so I think that would be interesting and it might even save the experience for people who have that same kind of problem because the Apple TV is a really wonderful device but it's also a very expensive device compared to its competition and little hiccups like that just give people a a really bad taste in their mouth that lingers people remember when something didn't work it does which is why people should be annoyed with the whole Alexa experience on the fire Cube the fact that she's pulling up the wrong stuff that's a huge problem also but you when I used Google home with chomecast to do things by voice again it worked brilliantly so Amazon's got to get there but in terms of the the TV experience itself it's not terrible it's not the worst except when the devices are too slow to actually run it so what we're saying here is first of all it's really slow Hardware the voice control is kind of pants because your your voice doesn't really deliver on that fire Cube the for the the 4K HDR content there's no 4K content they did upgrade it for you and when you try and cast a video it uh it doesn't really work well either right well you don't have you don't have um I don't think you have chomecast or AirPlay obviously with that so any Apple user out there who wants to be able to you like you know we're sitting in the living room I I did this last night we're watching a video on our phone I'm like hey check this out out faith and uh I go to show my girlfriend this video throw it to the TV 2 seconds and then we go back to watching what we were watching it's incredibly easy and seamless and if you I mean you can do it for everything you can mirror the screen of your phone like it's you can work on your computer it's so easy and then there's you know the fire Cube if you've got an Apple device there's still stuff you can do um obviously you can control a lot more stuff through Alexa that way but it just does not have the options that the Apple TV has uh and AirPlay has yeah I uh I have a chomecast here with me while I'm traveling I also have a uh a streaming box that runs Cody an Android box and I used to travel with the Apple TV but it's a kind of a big box to travel with you know you you want something a little smaller and being able to to cast stuff goes a way I ended up putting air server on my Mac and connecting my Mac for a while when I wanted to cter airplay yeah now there's another issue with this which is if you have uh if you have Alexa going and you have the fire Cube and you have a bunch of iot devices in your home that are also Alex compatible like suppose you want to display the video feed from a cloud cam if you tried to do that from your phone it it's it's pretty quick right you have to pull out your phone you have to launch the app you have to wait for it to connect it's about 15 seconds but if you've already got the Alexa fire Cube set up you ought to be able to just ask for it by voice right yeah you would think if the TV is already on that's pretty cool but if the TV isn't on and you have to have the firey Cube turn on the TV it takes about 10 seconds for the feed to show up on your phone and 30 seconds on the so if you were doing a cloud Cam and internally monitoring your house like you know you had a cam set up in the the children's bedroom for example and you heard a noise from the nursery 30 seconds is kind of a long time yeah it's it's it's definitely quite a delay and on the Apple TV side of things since we're going to keep comparing the two um there is no direct option for that so you can't you know while the Apple TV is off I can't ask another Siri device to show it on my Apple TV I can't hold down the Siri button and ask her to show me my feeds there are definitely ways to do it I use homecam on my Apple TV and from when I launched the app to when my feed show up is only like maybe a second but there isn't an a from like a complet powered off TV State and everything I mean I guess at that point it's still going to be quicker if I can just wait for my TV to turn on that time should be the same when I open the app to the time that my home cam my homekit camera show up it is only maybe a second or two of DeLay So I guess even in that regard based on just TV opening and having to open in the app it's still going to be faster on an Apple TV but for such a tight integration between the Amazon Cloud cameras and the cube I would have thought that they would have optimized that a bit more yeah it should work better so you're using homecam as an application on Apple TV to view your homekit compatible cameras yes neat it works really well and they've got a a cool little interface set up so the developer actually made us you can control your other devices at the same time so when I open up like my patio or my dining room in home cam I can actually control the other devices in the room so it's like little like it's like a tap or a hold or something and it brings up all the lights and everything yeah so I can like while watching the camera feed I can adjust my devices so if I'm watching The Patio I'm like wait what's going on on my patio is that like something getting into something hold on let me turn on my patio lights oh yep that's a thing and then I could I think I can even use uh I could pull my phone and us like the 2way communication which I don't think works through homecam but um I could always you know run outside to yell at the raccoon or something thing but it's nice enough to be able to like turn on the lights when I'm looking through my camera and it's really really nicely done uh really good way to watch them on your Apple TV very cool well my next big adventure with homekit is making a non- homekit ceiling fan a non-smart ceiling fan into a homekit compatible ceiling fan so I'm I'm still working through that what uh way you going there's a few different options you've got there well you you need to give me some advice about what my options are because what I've done so far is I've put in a Bluetooth controller into the ceiling fan and uh have been trying to use homebridge for that yeah so I mean you can use the Bluetooth controller for that straight through homebridge I believe you could use um an off the shelf um uh remote kit a lot of them sell those and then use a make a homekit IR Blaster with homebridge and then there's going to be a couple different companies out there like I devices I think has one launching this year that is an actual just wall switch replacement so you swap out your wall and do that right and that's where I'm really going eventually but but the Bluetooth one was a Bluetooth remote kit that was an off-the-shelf kit M and the I it worked with the Bluetooth app and getting homebridge to control it worked somewhat it was uh there it's a little hit or miss on in terms of its signaling but for the most part it worked fine and um my real issue is with homebridge instability yeah well I guess there's not much you can do do with that in the the short term but maybe we'll see some remotes that are capable of controlling those in the future um again yeah who knows well I'm looking forward to the uh the I devices product I have asked them where that is and I have not gotten a word back from their PR rep yeah I can't get a firm answer either other than I think I think they're still aiming for this year but they've definitely miss Targets in the past I remember my excitement for their their button there just going to be a wall sticking but it was going to be the first like homekit button that was out there they would just stick on your wall of course now we've got ones from Elgato Eve we've got the Logitech p we've got the Hue buttons that work the tap and the dimmer switch we've got the one from fibaro got lots of different options out there at this point but that was going to be one of the first ones and then when it launched they stripped out the homekit functionality and it would only control the I devices products and it's like okay all the other ones support homekit and then you have this one switch that won't work with any other homekit devices so that was a bit of a bummer absolutely well I want to go ahead and bring this show to a close we're going to wrap things up here Andrew where can people find you on the internet can always find me on appleinsider.com and they can reach out to me on Twitter at Andrew U and people should totally email us with listener questions I I had a question earlier this week from someone on Twitter asking me about what to do with a 17inch MacBook Pro that seems to have a broken GPU in it and you know there there are all kinds of listener questions we are ready to try and help answer and bring up on the show for that person the answer was to wrap the MacBook Pro in a blanket to see if I can get the screen to come on and then install uh gfx which is a graphics selector tool and then force it to use the integrated Intel chip which isn't burnt up and then turn that laptop into a server so there are all kinds of neat things we can discuss go ahead and let us know how we're doing please go ahead and email us please go ahead and leave reviews on iTunes we like hearing from you and we will be back next week Andrew I'll see you then talk to you later Victoryou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome back everybody to another episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor and joining me is the esteemed Andrew O'Hara what's going on Victor I'm fantastic how are you pretty good pretty good I'm so glad that you're here and we've got all of our handsome listeners the best dressed people in in town listening to us on the podcast and I am ready to talk talk all about first of all Stitcher premium so if you haven't joined Stitcher premium yet now is the perfect time Stitcher premium gets you completely adree episodes of hundreds of shows like Comedy Bang Bang WTF with Mark Maron and how did this get made you also get 21,000 hours of exclusive content new exclusive Originals like Marvel's Wolverine and is's fruit are launching every week for Stitcher premium members and if you love podcasts you're missing out when you listen to adree episodes in Stitcher premium your favorite podcasters get paid help support support your favorite shows and join Stitcher premium today for a free month of listening go to Stitcher premium.com and use the promo code apple and you know I I want to thank one of our listeners who kind enough point out to me that I have been I've been pronouncing one of those names of those podcasts incorrectly all this time can you imagine it's uh I'm only mildly embarrassed and it's just because there are so many good podcasts out there that it is difficult to listen to even the ones that are are the most well-known and the best made and best produced we certainly try our best here and I I apologize for that so we've corrected the pronunciation now jumping right in there's there's been a conversation that we've been having on this show for going back almost 3 years now and it's been about who makes the modem inside the iPhone the modem is the part that contains the Wi-Fi radios it also contains the cellular data connection and so you know if you think back to the iPhone 4 when it was announced that iPhone 4 was going to gain compatibility with Verizon everyone knew that qualcom was going to be making the modem because Qualcomm are the people that own the patents around CDMA the technology that was used for iPhone 4 at that time that was the 3G technology that was required used by Verizon for making calls now obviously apple and Qualcomm are having a bit of a disagreement and while that's going on it Intel has been in consideration for making the modems and of course did make some of the modems for the iPhone 10 and iPhone 8 is that right yeah we we've been sitting here looking at this and thinking all along that intel was going to simply just be the the modem maker going forward and it wasn't going to be Qualcomm at this point or at least that Apple was going to reduce their business with Qualcomm until this problem's resolved and we have news that suggests that no we're all mistaken Apple will not be using Intel modems for the next iPhones and and so the news here is that apple has notified Intel they've actually let Intel know that they are not going to use a mobile modem developed by Intel in its next Generation mobile device H this is Intel Executives saying in their Communications that um further development of the modem component internally called Sunny Peak has been halted and the Intel team that's working on the product will be directed to other projects so it is very much clear that Intel is not going to be doing that that Intel Executives described apple as the Key Mobile Customer for the 5G M modem that they were developing Intel expected Apple to be the main volume driver for the product and if Apple isn't buying they aren't making now this is all from an internal document that was provided to calcalist calcalist asked Intel for comment and Intel said sorry we don't comment on matters like that we don't comment on matters pertaining to customers and apple similarly has not responded for coming Sunny Peak is a 5G Wi-Fi and Bluetooth component designed by Intel apparently intended for Apple's future phones now 5G is a real thing 5G is a huge deal what do you know about 5G Andrew I have not read I mean I know the basic gist of it I know kind of where the roll out's been happening but it's still looking like it's a little bit away but it's going to be a huge deal when it actually does get here so the the there are a couple of interesting effects that come from it first of all it it provides super high bandwidth right it's like ridiculous speeds it's yeah like mostly faster than people's home Wi-Fi will be for sure oh yeah and the the other thing that it provides is um because it has to be in a mobile device it's it's respectful of power demands we we've always had this sort of separation between cell providers and home internet providers and you know your cell provider could provide you with internet but you weren't going to use them as your only internet connection because it's just too expensive if you actually use lots of data to use your cell provider even if you have a so-called unlimited plan but in in the future where a cell carrier can provide you with a a set of speeds that are rival or surpass your home internet provider cuz remember a cable modem company even if they're using docus 3.0 or 3.1 can really only provide you with what about 350 Meg down MH yeah and it's going to be asymmetric you're going to get 350 Meg down and 100 up or something like that right if you're lucky it's not going to be a 350 350 is it no no so unless you have a a gigabit fiber connection you know you're you're not going to get it and there's some suggestion that 5G may even deliver more than that Gab fiber connection can deliver um it's it's uncertain but even so to to have a cell connection that can deliver better internet faster internet than most of the isps available in North America is a big deal would you agree oh yeah for sure I mean okay yeah so so so what happens to Comcast and spectrum and and uh all of these cable providers in that future and what happens to the cell carriers because it seems to me that all you need to do is get a cell modem for your house and use that as your router and you know your ISP business moves over to your phone business yeah I I mean I can definitely see it a lot of times as like why would you want to use your slow home Wi-Fi when you can have way faster speeds on your phone and if you could use that for the other devices in your house as long as you're able to get use a respectful amount of data or have an appropriate plan it definitely seems like the way to go for a lot of people and you're kind of consolidating you're getting rid of one thing and go to the other especially people using streaming services for their TV um Netflix Hulu Sling all that stuff lose a lot of the reason to to go with a separate you know cable company for your home now look at someone like T-Mobile and Sprint where T-Mobile has the their their zero rating plans where if you have a T-Mobile plan you want to view Netflix you can view Netflix at no hit to your data plan right yeah if you do that for your home internet service you can watch all the Netflix you want it doesn't count against your data and you you have sorted out your TV at no additional cost yeah and then you're using it kind of puts these cable companies on the run as well as anyone who's not included in that zero rating plan anyone who's not absolutely Netflix or any of those other uh streaming services yeah totally so it's it's a big deal and and it's also an equally big deal that apple is not using Intel for this this modem because that's a big hit to Intel Intel is kind of taking a beating lately right um Intel's had a huge turmoil with their CEO turnover and it's not clear whose leadership is right now is it and no not really he he just left and I don't know that there's even been a named replacement at this moment and it it seems like it's a little up in the air add to that the difficult that they've had getting chips out that are ones that Apple's been seeking to upgrade MacBook Pros for example or presumably something that they want to use in a Mac Pro that has yet to materialize um it's it's looking more and more like Intel may be something to be concerned about here now we've got a companion story that we ran about mediatech now mediatech got tapped to do the homepod Wi-Fi chip orders mediatech supplies chips for a lot of Android tablets they they make cheap laptops um I remember there was a a laptop that I picked up in Aldi and Germany at one point that uh was based on a Media Tech upset for some things um they they do a bunch of stuff a lot of cheap Android phones have have Tech processors in them so certainly they're able to make product they are getting closer to making the uh the iPhone modem is what the supply chain sources claim now obviously this is a supply chain Source it's the sources of Digi times so it's not entirely certain what exactly will happen but Media Tech they they claim is likely to provide customized Wi-Fi chips required for the homepod uh and if confirmed this mediatech would providing the same Wi-Fi and Bluetooth module that's already provide supplied for the speaker by broadcom and they could displace Intel supplies now we don't know a whole lot more than that but mediatech did reveal that they've got a 5G modem chip set that they call The Helio M70 um they claim it's developed on the 3gpp standards that it's able to transmit up to 5 gbits per second on a 5G Network and that it's a 7 nanometer process by tsmc so it's going to have reduced power consumption can you imagine having a phone that can do 5 gbits per second I would like to imagine that I would I mean if you could do that then you know it seems to me you could you could uh pretty easily come up with a router out of just an old phone and uh well rather a new phone and and an ethernet connection off of it it doesn't sound out of the Ral possibility yeah I mean that's that would be insane that'd be amazing but of course they're companies are going to supply modems like that too because like I said you know T-Mobile wants to be able to be all of your your customers right they they want you all in just as AT&T does so this is kind of huge I think we're we're sort of watching these things come together where it's going to be a changing landscape for how you get internet delivered to your house now other things that are happening that are changing is uh we have an investor note an analyst report which is revising up their shipment forecast for iPhone models in uh the late 2018 in the second half of 18 the idea here is that because there's the 6.1 in LCD iPhone that that that phone and the 6 and 1/2 in OLED iPhone are are likely to sell a lot more than they previously expected they're they're revising these shipments up by about 10% they figure it'll be uh what 80 to 90 million units of these things and that's up from 75 to 85 million units that they were originally predicting I I want to see it they think in third quarter and fourth quarter that it's going to grow year on year and reach over uh 15 to 20 million units and 60 to 70 million units year on year respectively so this is kind of cool I I think I'm also looking forward to that phone model personally I'd like to hear from our listeners if you have already sort of figured out which phone is appropriate for you which one you're looking forward to hearing more about and purchasing Andrew are you in the market for a phone upgrade um I'm always in the market for a phone upgrade Victor all the time are you looking forward to these new iPhones I I am always looking I mean even at after all this time I feel like I would start to get like you know underwhelmed and may I may not be as excited as maybe I used to be but I am still like over the moon over possible new iPhone models I always get excited about them um I'm really excited to see this lineup this year I feel like with the addition of the 10 last year it's getting very murky we're starting to wonder like okay what what are they going to name this thing are we going to have the iPhones 11s and 12s that seems unlikely there's there's so we got new models coming out even I think we saw some rumors on some new colors for iPhones possibly coming out um it's going to get kind of confusing on Which models are sticking around which ones are new what sizes there are cuz we're going to have the iPhone 10 we're going to have this new middle one that is the 6.1 in that's like between an iPhone 10 and iPhone 10 plus but it's going to have that cheaper LCD display so that's going to be like a much cheaper model but it's going to have you know a larger display in there it's going to be very interesting to see what actually comes out and what the biggest differentiators are for those for the new phones what I'm really interested to see is what the price points will be because we we had this huge controversy that we made about and and and we really did make it I mean the we we were concerned about what it would mean for Apple if they moved to the Thousand price point they did and and honestly it didn't really hurt them in any way people who wanted iPhones that weren't $1,000 bought iPhone 8 people that wanted to buy the best one they went ahead and they paid their money and no one really cared so that was that was something we were really concerned about that didn't come to pass I'm wondering what the price points will be this year because now that we know that there's $1,000 price point what does that look like for the other phones I agree is this new you know is the iPhone 10 model going to drop a little in price or are they going to keep the iPhone 10 where it is and bump up the price even higher for the plus-size model I know a lot of people that I talked with like they were already on like the like the installment plans where they're paying you know 35 37 a month or something and a lot of people I know went from the plus model to the iPhone 10 cuz really when they were looking at their monthly plans it was only a couple more dollars so they were like why stick with like you know the8 plus when I could go to the 10 which is completely new and has a whole lot of new features and better cameras and all this stuff for only a couple dollars more a month so it when it came down to like those monthly installment plans a lot of people I knew just they didn't care was a couple dollars difference and they got a much better phone in their eyes yeah are they paying those installment plans through their carrier or are they paying them through the Apple upgrade program I mean I've talked to a lot of people about it and I it's it's it's generally split I know a few people who are doing it through apple and a few people who are doing it through the actual carriers yeah I I am mixed see I wanted to do things through the Apple upgrade program and the thing that stopped me is that what what I really want is to be carrier independent I want to be able to not be not have a phone that's locked and I want to be able to move from carrier to carrier whenever I feel like it and that's not possible it was almost possible through the Apple upgrade program because if you're paying Apple then then why should anyone care but when you go to buy a phone through the Apple upgrade program they want to know right away who your carrier is yeah so it's it's um it's difficult the only way to get an unlocked phone and not be beholden to them is to still buy you know the the straight up cash only price basically or the the the onetime purchase price yep it's disappointing I was hoping that someone would lead the way on Carrier Independence but as it looks now there's just more and more lock in you know I rattled on about this a couple episodes ago where Verizon has has broken their agreement and broken the rules with the FCC and and is violating them actively by locking handsets and um they're not allowed to under the terms that they agreed when they agreed to purchase Spectrum it's frustrating as heck for me that they do this kind of consumer lock in and I I think there needs to be a way to make it all go away that's that's my personal opinion and it's it's not about net neutrality it's about customer portability you know the phone as long as you're paying off the phone why should you be beholden to the the actual service part of it because it's not subsidized I mean I guess maybe they look at it as just giving you essentially that loan on the phone you're not paying a super amount of interest on that so they want to make that up other ways by you paying for your monthly bill with them fine if you're doing that through the carrier it makes sense but if you're doing that through Apple why is this Arrangement need to exist I don't know I don't know it's it's Beyond me it annoys me it's something I'm going to have to learn about and speaking of learning udemy is the largest and most accessible online learning marketplace with the most courses teachers and opportunities for students everywhere around the globe udemy has over 65,000 courses from coding to comicbook Art available anywhere on their website and app you know I really enjoy podcasting and and listening to podcasts is a learning experience because we get to to talk about ideas I get to hear from listeners and we like that listener feedback and and this this the internet enables a lot of things that years ago wouldn't have been available to us Emy is is one of those kinds of tools that is just another part of the internet's ability to to help us learn and help us grow ourselves and our skills so you know I I have looked through the classes I have yet to take a class but I am looking at all kinds of things about iOS development and there are tons of courses there whether it's Swift or or objective c or any of the different ways that you can work to to build an app and I kind of want to do it it's been years since I've published anything on the App Store I need to go back and and figure out how this all works now and I'm I'm kind of even more excited now that there's marzipan because the the ideal ability idea of being able to to Port apps across from IOS to Mac OS is a really interesting idea to me and one we're going to talk about later on in the show now em me has something for everyone if you're not interested in developing or programming they have courses on just about anything you can possibly think of and it's available on the computer it's available on an app on the phone it's pretty much everywhere you can have access to new knowledge wherever you are so check out udemy they've helped students all over the world improve their skills their careers and their lives and they've helped me set up this exclusive offer just for you dear listener go to ud. myapple Insider right now and get 90% off when you sign up for classes there is no better price than this so sign up for classes Now using my link ud. myapple Insider and get access to lifechanging classes for 90% off make sure you download the app for your phone so you can stream your studies wherever you are that's ud. myapple Insider ud. myapple Insider and not only will you be the most handsomely dressed listener you will also be the best educated now what email service do you use Andrew you mean what client or provider if I emailed you yeah what provider would I be emailing you at what comes after the sign on your email I'm Still rocking a vintage now atm.com email address as my primary I know as your primary yeah how many outage do you get um not I say that well laughing I'm I'm kind of teasing you there yeah still works still holding on is it that's pretty cool I I have as my iCloud account I have an atme domain atme me.com yeah I have a few aliases set up so obviously there was there was the atm.com and then when it switched to the mobile me I had I at that point I created a few aliases cuz my regular email has got like numbers in it and an m and an N right next to each other which is a stupid thing whenever you try to say your email and they're like wait what were those letters yeah that's that's obnoxious yeah I created like a really easy Alias and those all got the at me domains um I don't I mean I guess I technically have some at iCloud cuz I think you can just still log in with you're you're forced basically yeah so I still have those but I still keep my my vintage one around other than my personalized domain one no no I have a I have a personalized domain I have the at mac.com and I have at me.com and I don't have any ales and I don't have letters and numbers that are bad like that in my name for that one but interestingly in 2005 when when Gmail was the new hotness and it was so hot that people were trading duct tape wallets and E strange created knick-knacks to try and convince people to give them a Gmail account because they were in short supply do you remember those days no I don't oh so oh my God in 2005 Gmail launched and it was the hottest thing ever the internet had ever seen at that time um maybe the dancing baby from Ali MCB was just as hot but but basically it was it was a cool thing to get a Gmail address and no one had them and you had to get invited into the program to get them and then you could recommend or give one other invite out and so people were trading things like like um rubber inner tube wallets wallets made out of rubber inner tube tire tire inner tube or or duct tape wallets or other creative kinds of stuff you know he man I'll give you this thing that I normally solve for 15 bucks for a Gmail address so that people could get in on Gmail addresses and it wasn't that web mail was a new thing Web Mail was invented by Hotmail which was spot by Microsoft but it was that this was Google doing it right and it really was for a long time the the best interface for web mail you could find and my email that I use primarily as a Gmail address why are we talking about this why should anyone care I don't know yeah you do you read the story the same as I did come on why why should anyone care about this stuff um in case other people happen to be uh reading your emails perhaps who would do such a thing I don't know certainly not Google for sure but maybe other app developers The Wall Street Journal published this report that says that even though Google swears up and down that they are not reading emails to create new services or app features that the bulk of emails are scanned electronically by computer software but there are no humans doing it as far as they're concerned right but app developers that are a part of Google's Gmail program are allowed to read these emails to create new services or app features and return path is a company a firm that skims emails for data of interest to marketers scanned the inboxes of over 2 million people leaving 8,000 unredacted emails to be read by its employees other marketing companies as well as app makers also have access to Gmail emails now Google's not alone in this practice Microsoft Verizon Oaths Communications which you know Verizon bought out of AOL and all that stuff also let Partners skim their user emails oath was was actually formed out of the Yahoo acquisition says access is considered on a case-by casee basis and requires explicit consent from users which is similar policies that have Microsoft has 25 and current and former employees of app developers and data companies found that the practice of reviewing email data has become really common in the industry Google told the journal that their own employees only read user emails in very specific cases where you ask us to and give us consent or where we need to for security purposes such as investigating a bug or abuse well Google lets any user revoke access to any apps at any point now I've tried to do this and when you do it you have to go to your Google account you have to go through security you have to there are like 10 steps to get at where this stuff is to revoke access to apps it's it's it's not easy it's way easy to allow it click okay it's really difficult to disallow it now in June of last year Google announced that the company would begin serving ads based on a user settings meaning that consumer Gmail accounts would not be used or scanned for ad personalization by Google but here we are and there are all these other app developers and marketing companies that are doing it for them and doing it to their own Advantage so now I'm thinking about how difficult is it to migrate my Google account especially since I'm now a Google customer for Google f and um they uh they just me a huge amount of additional space for drive and email here we are that's the thing is you know every one of these companies that is is an ad supported company at one point or other is doing things to try and optimize for that and sell the data in some way or sell access to the data in some way to create Services it's TR to say it now you if you're if you're not paying for it then you are the product the the difficult thing is figuring out how to be a delist and how to remove yourself from that situation if you so choose you know there are plenty of people that say it's fine to be the product and they're happy with that at the same time I I I think it's reasonable to be concerned about how much data you're allowing out there and how big a Target it can make of you for things in the future that that are no longer okay as they are today you know say attitudes shift and you've got your emails that that are being scanned for one thing and all of a sudden that becomes unpopular now you have to go ahead and scrub your emails or scrub your history or figure out how to undo that it's it's just an awkward situation to have that much data hanging around there and be U be open to so in the past we've run articles about deleting Facebook or deleting cleaning Facebook posts and likes and things like that I'm thinking we may have to figure out how to talk about how to migrate away from Gmail and if if I write that article which I'm strongly thinking about right now you'll find it here on Apple Insider now Andrew have you given any thought to Amazon's fire Cube I mean no I definitely have not I have not been impressed by their their Fire Sticks their other Fire TV stuff and I was like when the CU came out I was immediately underwhelmed and I was I was frankly a little bit annoyed that a lot of people were going to buy this thing because I don't know I mean I'm not trying to be biased against the Apple TV which is completely what I like and use but this thing just is not it's not peing my interest when it comes to set top boxes okay so first of all I know people that love their am Amazon Fire devices I have a fire box the first gen one I had the first gen fire stick um I have set up a bunch of second gen fire sticks for people and there are a couple of things that make fire popular for people first of all it's not a terrible interface it it does have the you know Amazon and Netflix and Hulu and Direct TV and PS View and a sling and a bunch of services that people like on them it has Alexa which if you like Alexa it's great um for a long time the fire box required the use of the button for that but if you had an Alexa device like a DOT or an echko in the house you could use those and then they added the ability finally to be able to send video by voice from the the dot or the echo to the Fire TV and that works well it took them a while to get there and took a while for to get to work very well but it does work the um the combination of the IR Blaster is a good idea I think and I like very much launching things by voice if I can just say you know hey hey Alexa and I'm sorry for trigging anyone who's got a device in the background but hi High whatever open stranger things on Netflix and having it pull up the episode and pick up where I left off that is brilliant I like that a lot and there there are reasons for this thing to exist but their implementation appears to be lacking would you agree oh definitely there there's definitely going to be positives I mean personally I don't use Alexa that much I definitely have a few Alexa devices but they seem almost more annoyances at this point as Siri has continued to grow throughout my life but there's a lot of stuff to like with Alexa and that was probably one of the main things that I was intrigued by them but everything else is just not not doing it for me not doing it for me here so here's why I would hold off on this device it it's using the same processor as the one used in the Raspberry Pi 3 and well that processor works great for a bunch of projects that I run on Raspberry Pi I I have run Cody the uh the video application on you know the media center application on Raspberry Pi using Libra which is a very light OS whose motto is something like just enough OS to run Cody basically they've stripped out everything else so that it's as fast as possible and it's still a little slow because you're asking a lot of a Raspberry Pi and so if that's the chip that they're using for this device they're asking a lot of it because they're trying to run all of Prime video they're trying to run Hulu they're trying to run Netflix and trying to IR blast and manage all of this and manage voice it's it's just too much to really ask of essentially a Raspberry Pi very much so and especially when you compare that to the Apple TV again the 4K is running that I think a10x right now which is what they're running in you know the high-end iPads that's a huge difference in in processors between the two units apps are going to take a long time to load on on Amazon Fire TV the uh the cube it's just I I think the thing to do is if this at all interests you and I think it is intriguing uh wait for a version two they're they're going to have to try and make it suitable for 4K they're going to have to try and and make it really work better they say that when you ask her to find 4K movies that it displays regular HD I I think they've got some work to do yeah and they don't they also don't upgrade any of your purchases I believe they don't do that like they did on the Apple TV when Apple came out with 4K the Apple TV they immediately upgraded any video you had that was available in 4k to 4K and they don't do that on the uh the fire Cube and even if you buy something that's the same price on iTunes you're getting an HD version a lot of the times through the fire Cube versus the Apple TV would give you 4K so even purchase it at the same price you're not even getting the same quality even though it should be capable of it yeah I have a friend who who prefers the Amazon Fire devices he has the Apple TV 4 and when he updated it to the latest IOS 11.4 on it it forgot the pairing with the remote and would not let him click past one of the initial steps that it shows you to re repair the remote he had to dig out a remote for an Apple TV 2 which had the physical remote the mechanical remote and use that press the okay button to get past the uh the steps of setting it up again before he could repair it with the Bluetooth remote he hates that thing and he's he's disappointed with the whole experience because of Siri remote for the Apple 4th gen well as we talked about last time maybe we're going to see some awesome new uh third party remotes they work with the Apple TV I hope so I think that would be interesting and it might even save the experience for people who have that same kind of problem because the Apple TV is a really wonderful device but it's also a very expensive device compared to its competition and little hiccups like that just give people a a really bad taste in their mouth that lingers people remember when something didn't work it does which is why people should be annoyed with the whole Alexa experience on the fire Cube the fact that she's pulling up the wrong stuff that's a huge problem also but you when I used Google home with chomecast to do things by voice again it worked brilliantly so Amazon's got to get there but in terms of the the TV experience itself it's not terrible it's not the worst except when the devices are too slow to actually run it so what we're saying here is first of all it's really slow Hardware the voice control is kind of pants because your your voice doesn't really deliver on that fire Cube the for the the 4K HDR content there's no 4K content they did upgrade it for you and when you try and cast a video it uh it doesn't really work well either right well you don't have you don't have um I don't think you have chomecast or AirPlay obviously with that so any Apple user out there who wants to be able to you like you know we're sitting in the living room I I did this last night we're watching a video on our phone I'm like hey check this out out faith and uh I go to show my girlfriend this video throw it to the TV 2 seconds and then we go back to watching what we were watching it's incredibly easy and seamless and if you I mean you can do it for everything you can mirror the screen of your phone like it's you can work on your computer it's so easy and then there's you know the fire Cube if you've got an Apple device there's still stuff you can do um obviously you can control a lot more stuff through Alexa that way but it just does not have the options that the Apple TV has uh and AirPlay has yeah I uh I have a chomecast here with me while I'm traveling I also have a uh a streaming box that runs Cody an Android box and I used to travel with the Apple TV but it's a kind of a big box to travel with you know you you want something a little smaller and being able to to cast stuff goes a way I ended up putting air server on my Mac and connecting my Mac for a while when I wanted to cter airplay yeah now there's another issue with this which is if you have uh if you have Alexa going and you have the fire Cube and you have a bunch of iot devices in your home that are also Alex compatible like suppose you want to display the video feed from a cloud cam if you tried to do that from your phone it it's it's pretty quick right you have to pull out your phone you have to launch the app you have to wait for it to connect it's about 15 seconds but if you've already got the Alexa fire Cube set up you ought to be able to just ask for it by voice right yeah you would think if the TV is already on that's pretty cool but if the TV isn't on and you have to have the firey Cube turn on the TV it takes about 10 seconds for the feed to show up on your phone and 30 seconds on the so if you were doing a cloud Cam and internally monitoring your house like you know you had a cam set up in the the children's bedroom for example and you heard a noise from the nursery 30 seconds is kind of a long time yeah it's it's it's definitely quite a delay and on the Apple TV side of things since we're going to keep comparing the two um there is no direct option for that so you can't you know while the Apple TV is off I can't ask another Siri device to show it on my Apple TV I can't hold down the Siri button and ask her to show me my feeds there are definitely ways to do it I use homecam on my Apple TV and from when I launched the app to when my feed show up is only like maybe a second but there isn't an a from like a complet powered off TV State and everything I mean I guess at that point it's still going to be quicker if I can just wait for my TV to turn on that time should be the same when I open the app to the time that my home cam my homekit camera show up it is only maybe a second or two of DeLay So I guess even in that regard based on just TV opening and having to open in the app it's still going to be faster on an Apple TV but for such a tight integration between the Amazon Cloud cameras and the cube I would have thought that they would have optimized that a bit more yeah it should work better so you're using homecam as an application on Apple TV to view your homekit compatible cameras yes neat it works really well and they've got a a cool little interface set up so the developer actually made us you can control your other devices at the same time so when I open up like my patio or my dining room in home cam I can actually control the other devices in the room so it's like little like it's like a tap or a hold or something and it brings up all the lights and everything yeah so I can like while watching the camera feed I can adjust my devices so if I'm watching The Patio I'm like wait what's going on on my patio is that like something getting into something hold on let me turn on my patio lights oh yep that's a thing and then I could I think I can even use uh I could pull my phone and us like the 2way communication which I don't think works through homecam but um I could always you know run outside to yell at the raccoon or something thing but it's nice enough to be able to like turn on the lights when I'm looking through my camera and it's really really nicely done uh really good way to watch them on your Apple TV very cool well my next big adventure with homekit is making a non- homekit ceiling fan a non-smart ceiling fan into a homekit compatible ceiling fan so I'm I'm still working through that what uh way you going there's a few different options you've got there well you you need to give me some advice about what my options are because what I've done so far is I've put in a Bluetooth controller into the ceiling fan and uh have been trying to use homebridge for that yeah so I mean you can use the Bluetooth controller for that straight through homebridge I believe you could use um an off the shelf um uh remote kit a lot of them sell those and then use a make a homekit IR Blaster with homebridge and then there's going to be a couple different companies out there like I devices I think has one launching this year that is an actual just wall switch replacement so you swap out your wall and do that right and that's where I'm really going eventually but but the Bluetooth one was a Bluetooth remote kit that was an off-the-shelf kit M and the I it worked with the Bluetooth app and getting homebridge to control it worked somewhat it was uh there it's a little hit or miss on in terms of its signaling but for the most part it worked fine and um my real issue is with homebridge instability yeah well I guess there's not much you can do do with that in the the short term but maybe we'll see some remotes that are capable of controlling those in the future um again yeah who knows well I'm looking forward to the uh the I devices product I have asked them where that is and I have not gotten a word back from their PR rep yeah I can't get a firm answer either other than I think I think they're still aiming for this year but they've definitely miss Targets in the past I remember my excitement for their their button there just going to be a wall sticking but it was going to be the first like homekit button that was out there they would just stick on your wall of course now we've got ones from Elgato Eve we've got the Logitech p we've got the Hue buttons that work the tap and the dimmer switch we've got the one from fibaro got lots of different options out there at this point but that was going to be one of the first ones and then when it launched they stripped out the homekit functionality and it would only control the I devices products and it's like okay all the other ones support homekit and then you have this one switch that won't work with any other homekit devices so that was a bit of a bummer absolutely well I want to go ahead and bring this show to a close we're going to wrap things up here Andrew where can people find you on the internet can always find me on appleinsider.com and they can reach out to me on Twitter at Andrew U and people should totally email us with listener questions I I had a question earlier this week from someone on Twitter asking me about what to do with a 17inch MacBook Pro that seems to have a broken GPU in it and you know there there are all kinds of listener questions we are ready to try and help answer and bring up on the show for that person the answer was to wrap the MacBook Pro in a blanket to see if I can get the screen to come on and then install uh gfx which is a graphics selector tool and then force it to use the integrated Intel chip which isn't burnt up and then turn that laptop into a server so there are all kinds of neat things we can discuss go ahead and let us know how we're doing please go ahead and email us please go ahead and leave reviews on iTunes we like hearing from you and we will be back next week Andrew I'll see you then talk to you later Victoryou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome back everybody to another episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor and joining me is the esteemed Andrew O'Hara what's going on Victor I'm fantastic how are you pretty good pretty good I'm so glad that you're here and we've got all of our handsome listeners the best dressed people in in town listening to us on the podcast and I am ready to talk talk all about first of all Stitcher premium so if you haven't joined Stitcher premium yet now is the perfect time Stitcher premium gets you completely adree episodes of hundreds of shows like Comedy Bang Bang WTF with Mark Maron and how did this get made you also get 21,000 hours of exclusive content new exclusive Originals like Marvel's Wolverine and is's fruit are launching every week for Stitcher premium members and if you love podcasts you're missing out when you listen to adree episodes in Stitcher premium your favorite podcasters get paid help support support your favorite shows and join Stitcher premium today for a free month of listening go to Stitcher premium.com and use the promo code apple and you know I I want to thank one of our listeners who kind enough point out to me that I have been I've been pronouncing one of those names of those podcasts incorrectly all this time can you imagine it's uh I'm only mildly embarrassed and it's just because there are so many good podcasts out there that it is difficult to listen to even the ones that are are the most well-known and the best made and best produced we certainly try our best here and I I apologize for that so we've corrected the pronunciation now jumping right in there's there's been a conversation that we've been having on this show for going back almost 3 years now and it's been about who makes the modem inside the iPhone the modem is the part that contains the Wi-Fi radios it also contains the cellular data connection and so you know if you think back to the iPhone 4 when it was announced that iPhone 4 was going to gain compatibility with Verizon everyone knew that qualcom was going to be making the modem because Qualcomm are the people that own the patents around CDMA the technology that was used for iPhone 4 at that time that was the 3G technology that was required used by Verizon for making calls now obviously apple and Qualcomm are having a bit of a disagreement and while that's going on it Intel has been in consideration for making the modems and of course did make some of the modems for the iPhone 10 and iPhone 8 is that right yeah we we've been sitting here looking at this and thinking all along that intel was going to simply just be the the modem maker going forward and it wasn't going to be Qualcomm at this point or at least that Apple was going to reduce their business with Qualcomm until this problem's resolved and we have news that suggests that no we're all mistaken Apple will not be using Intel modems for the next iPhones and and so the news here is that apple has notified Intel they've actually let Intel know that they are not going to use a mobile modem developed by Intel in its next Generation mobile device H this is Intel Executives saying in their Communications that um further development of the modem component internally called Sunny Peak has been halted and the Intel team that's working on the product will be directed to other projects so it is very much clear that Intel is not going to be doing that that Intel Executives described apple as the Key Mobile Customer for the 5G M modem that they were developing Intel expected Apple to be the main volume driver for the product and if Apple isn't buying they aren't making now this is all from an internal document that was provided to calcalist calcalist asked Intel for comment and Intel said sorry we don't comment on matters like that we don't comment on matters pertaining to customers and apple similarly has not responded for coming Sunny Peak is a 5G Wi-Fi and Bluetooth component designed by Intel apparently intended for Apple's future phones now 5G is a real thing 5G is a huge deal what do you know about 5G Andrew I have not read I mean I know the basic gist of it I know kind of where the roll out's been happening but it's still looking like it's a little bit away but it's going to be a huge deal when it actually does get here so the the there are a couple of interesting effects that come from it first of all it it provides super high bandwidth right it's like ridiculous speeds it's yeah like mostly faster than people's home Wi-Fi will be for sure oh yeah and the the other thing that it provides is um because it has to be in a mobile device it's it's respectful of power demands we we've always had this sort of separation between cell providers and home internet providers and you know your cell provider could provide you with internet but you weren't going to use them as your only internet connection because it's just too expensive if you actually use lots of data to use your cell provider even if you have a so-called unlimited plan but in in the future where a cell carrier can provide you with a a set of speeds that are rival or surpass your home internet provider cuz remember a cable modem company even if they're using docus 3.0 or 3.1 can really only provide you with what about 350 Meg down MH yeah and it's going to be asymmetric you're going to get 350 Meg down and 100 up or something like that right if you're lucky it's not going to be a 350 350 is it no no so unless you have a a gigabit fiber connection you know you're you're not going to get it and there's some suggestion that 5G may even deliver more than that Gab fiber connection can deliver um it's it's uncertain but even so to to have a cell connection that can deliver better internet faster internet than most of the isps available in North America is a big deal would you agree oh yeah for sure I mean okay yeah so so so what happens to Comcast and spectrum and and uh all of these cable providers in that future and what happens to the cell carriers because it seems to me that all you need to do is get a cell modem for your house and use that as your router and you know your ISP business moves over to your phone business yeah I I mean I can definitely see it a lot of times as like why would you want to use your slow home Wi-Fi when you can have way faster speeds on your phone and if you could use that for the other devices in your house as long as you're able to get use a respectful amount of data or have an appropriate plan it definitely seems like the way to go for a lot of people and you're kind of consolidating you're getting rid of one thing and go to the other especially people using streaming services for their TV um Netflix Hulu Sling all that stuff lose a lot of the reason to to go with a separate you know cable company for your home now look at someone like T-Mobile and Sprint where T-Mobile has the their their zero rating plans where if you have a T-Mobile plan you want to view Netflix you can view Netflix at no hit to your data plan right yeah if you do that for your home internet service you can watch all the Netflix you want it doesn't count against your data and you you have sorted out your TV at no additional cost yeah and then you're using it kind of puts these cable companies on the run as well as anyone who's not included in that zero rating plan anyone who's not absolutely Netflix or any of those other uh streaming services yeah totally so it's it's a big deal and and it's also an equally big deal that apple is not using Intel for this this modem because that's a big hit to Intel Intel is kind of taking a beating lately right um Intel's had a huge turmoil with their CEO turnover and it's not clear whose leadership is right now is it and no not really he he just left and I don't know that there's even been a named replacement at this moment and it it seems like it's a little up in the air add to that the difficult that they've had getting chips out that are ones that Apple's been seeking to upgrade MacBook Pros for example or presumably something that they want to use in a Mac Pro that has yet to materialize um it's it's looking more and more like Intel may be something to be concerned about here now we've got a companion story that we ran about mediatech now mediatech got tapped to do the homepod Wi-Fi chip orders mediatech supplies chips for a lot of Android tablets they they make cheap laptops um I remember there was a a laptop that I picked up in Aldi and Germany at one point that uh was based on a Media Tech upset for some things um they they do a bunch of stuff a lot of cheap Android phones have have Tech processors in them so certainly they're able to make product they are getting closer to making the uh the iPhone modem is what the supply chain sources claim now obviously this is a supply chain Source it's the sources of Digi times so it's not entirely certain what exactly will happen but Media Tech they they claim is likely to provide customized Wi-Fi chips required for the homepod uh and if confirmed this mediatech would providing the same Wi-Fi and Bluetooth module that's already provide supplied for the speaker by broadcom and they could displace Intel supplies now we don't know a whole lot more than that but mediatech did reveal that they've got a 5G modem chip set that they call The Helio M70 um they claim it's developed on the 3gpp standards that it's able to transmit up to 5 gbits per second on a 5G Network and that it's a 7 nanometer process by tsmc so it's going to have reduced power consumption can you imagine having a phone that can do 5 gbits per second I would like to imagine that I would I mean if you could do that then you know it seems to me you could you could uh pretty easily come up with a router out of just an old phone and uh well rather a new phone and and an ethernet connection off of it it doesn't sound out of the Ral possibility yeah I mean that's that would be insane that'd be amazing but of course they're companies are going to supply modems like that too because like I said you know T-Mobile wants to be able to be all of your your customers right they they want you all in just as AT&T does so this is kind of huge I think we're we're sort of watching these things come together where it's going to be a changing landscape for how you get internet delivered to your house now other things that are happening that are changing is uh we have an investor note an analyst report which is revising up their shipment forecast for iPhone models in uh the late 2018 in the second half of 18 the idea here is that because there's the 6.1 in LCD iPhone that that that phone and the 6 and 1/2 in OLED iPhone are are likely to sell a lot more than they previously expected they're they're revising these shipments up by about 10% they figure it'll be uh what 80 to 90 million units of these things and that's up from 75 to 85 million units that they were originally predicting I I want to see it they think in third quarter and fourth quarter that it's going to grow year on year and reach over uh 15 to 20 million units and 60 to 70 million units year on year respectively so this is kind of cool I I think I'm also looking forward to that phone model personally I'd like to hear from our listeners if you have already sort of figured out which phone is appropriate for you which one you're looking forward to hearing more about and purchasing Andrew are you in the market for a phone upgrade um I'm always in the market for a phone upgrade Victor all the time are you looking forward to these new iPhones I I am always looking I mean even at after all this time I feel like I would start to get like you know underwhelmed and may I may not be as excited as maybe I used to be but I am still like over the moon over possible new iPhone models I always get excited about them um I'm really excited to see this lineup this year I feel like with the addition of the 10 last year it's getting very murky we're starting to wonder like okay what what are they going to name this thing are we going to have the iPhones 11s and 12s that seems unlikely there's there's so we got new models coming out even I think we saw some rumors on some new colors for iPhones possibly coming out um it's going to get kind of confusing on Which models are sticking around which ones are new what sizes there are cuz we're going to have the iPhone 10 we're going to have this new middle one that is the 6.1 in that's like between an iPhone 10 and iPhone 10 plus but it's going to have that cheaper LCD display so that's going to be like a much cheaper model but it's going to have you know a larger display in there it's going to be very interesting to see what actually comes out and what the biggest differentiators are for those for the new phones what I'm really interested to see is what the price points will be because we we had this huge controversy that we made about and and and we really did make it I mean the we we were concerned about what it would mean for Apple if they moved to the Thousand price point they did and and honestly it didn't really hurt them in any way people who wanted iPhones that weren't $1,000 bought iPhone 8 people that wanted to buy the best one they went ahead and they paid their money and no one really cared so that was that was something we were really concerned about that didn't come to pass I'm wondering what the price points will be this year because now that we know that there's $1,000 price point what does that look like for the other phones I agree is this new you know is the iPhone 10 model going to drop a little in price or are they going to keep the iPhone 10 where it is and bump up the price even higher for the plus-size model I know a lot of people that I talked with like they were already on like the like the installment plans where they're paying you know 35 37 a month or something and a lot of people I know went from the plus model to the iPhone 10 cuz really when they were looking at their monthly plans it was only a couple more dollars so they were like why stick with like you know the8 plus when I could go to the 10 which is completely new and has a whole lot of new features and better cameras and all this stuff for only a couple dollars more a month so it when it came down to like those monthly installment plans a lot of people I knew just they didn't care was a couple dollars difference and they got a much better phone in their eyes yeah are they paying those installment plans through their carrier or are they paying them through the Apple upgrade program I mean I've talked to a lot of people about it and I it's it's it's generally split I know a few people who are doing it through apple and a few people who are doing it through the actual carriers yeah I I am mixed see I wanted to do things through the Apple upgrade program and the thing that stopped me is that what what I really want is to be carrier independent I want to be able to not be not have a phone that's locked and I want to be able to move from carrier to carrier whenever I feel like it and that's not possible it was almost possible through the Apple upgrade program because if you're paying Apple then then why should anyone care but when you go to buy a phone through the Apple upgrade program they want to know right away who your carrier is yeah so it's it's um it's difficult the only way to get an unlocked phone and not be beholden to them is to still buy you know the the straight up cash only price basically or the the the onetime purchase price yep it's disappointing I was hoping that someone would lead the way on Carrier Independence but as it looks now there's just more and more lock in you know I rattled on about this a couple episodes ago where Verizon has has broken their agreement and broken the rules with the FCC and and is violating them actively by locking handsets and um they're not allowed to under the terms that they agreed when they agreed to purchase Spectrum it's frustrating as heck for me that they do this kind of consumer lock in and I I think there needs to be a way to make it all go away that's that's my personal opinion and it's it's not about net neutrality it's about customer portability you know the phone as long as you're paying off the phone why should you be beholden to the the actual service part of it because it's not subsidized I mean I guess maybe they look at it as just giving you essentially that loan on the phone you're not paying a super amount of interest on that so they want to make that up other ways by you paying for your monthly bill with them fine if you're doing that through the carrier it makes sense but if you're doing that through Apple why is this Arrangement need to exist I don't know I don't know it's it's Beyond me it annoys me it's something I'm going to have to learn about and speaking of learning udemy is the largest and most accessible online learning marketplace with the most courses teachers and opportunities for students everywhere around the globe udemy has over 65,000 courses from coding to comicbook Art available anywhere on their website and app you know I really enjoy podcasting and and listening to podcasts is a learning experience because we get to to talk about ideas I get to hear from listeners and we like that listener feedback and and this this the internet enables a lot of things that years ago wouldn't have been available to us Emy is is one of those kinds of tools that is just another part of the internet's ability to to help us learn and help us grow ourselves and our skills so you know I I have looked through the classes I have yet to take a class but I am looking at all kinds of things about iOS development and there are tons of courses there whether it's Swift or or objective c or any of the different ways that you can work to to build an app and I kind of want to do it it's been years since I've published anything on the App Store I need to go back and and figure out how this all works now and I'm I'm kind of even more excited now that there's marzipan because the the ideal ability idea of being able to to Port apps across from IOS to Mac OS is a really interesting idea to me and one we're going to talk about later on in the show now em me has something for everyone if you're not interested in developing or programming they have courses on just about anything you can possibly think of and it's available on the computer it's available on an app on the phone it's pretty much everywhere you can have access to new knowledge wherever you are so check out udemy they've helped students all over the world improve their skills their careers and their lives and they've helped me set up this exclusive offer just for you dear listener go to ud. myapple Insider right now and get 90% off when you sign up for classes there is no better price than this so sign up for classes Now using my link ud. myapple Insider and get access to lifechanging classes for 90% off make sure you download the app for your phone so you can stream your studies wherever you are that's ud. myapple Insider ud. myapple Insider and not only will you be the most handsomely dressed listener you will also be the best educated now what email service do you use Andrew you mean what client or provider if I emailed you yeah what provider would I be emailing you at what comes after the sign on your email I'm Still rocking a vintage now atm.com email address as my primary I know as your primary yeah how many outage do you get um not I say that well laughing I'm I'm kind of teasing you there yeah still works still holding on is it that's pretty cool I I have as my iCloud account I have an atme domain atme me.com yeah I have a few aliases set up so obviously there was there was the atm.com and then when it switched to the mobile me I had I at that point I created a few aliases cuz my regular email has got like numbers in it and an m and an N right next to each other which is a stupid thing whenever you try to say your email and they're like wait what were those letters yeah that's that's obnoxious yeah I created like a really easy Alias and those all got the at me domains um I don't I mean I guess I technically have some at iCloud cuz I think you can just still log in with you're you're forced basically yeah so I still have those but I still keep my my vintage one around other than my personalized domain one no no I have a I have a personalized domain I have the at mac.com and I have at me.com and I don't have any ales and I don't have letters and numbers that are bad like that in my name for that one but interestingly in 2005 when when Gmail was the new hotness and it was so hot that people were trading duct tape wallets and E strange created knick-knacks to try and convince people to give them a Gmail account because they were in short supply do you remember those days no I don't oh so oh my God in 2005 Gmail launched and it was the hottest thing ever the internet had ever seen at that time um maybe the dancing baby from Ali MCB was just as hot but but basically it was it was a cool thing to get a Gmail address and no one had them and you had to get invited into the program to get them and then you could recommend or give one other invite out and so people were trading things like like um rubber inner tube wallets wallets made out of rubber inner tube tire tire inner tube or or duct tape wallets or other creative kinds of stuff you know he man I'll give you this thing that I normally solve for 15 bucks for a Gmail address so that people could get in on Gmail addresses and it wasn't that web mail was a new thing Web Mail was invented by Hotmail which was spot by Microsoft but it was that this was Google doing it right and it really was for a long time the the best interface for web mail you could find and my email that I use primarily as a Gmail address why are we talking about this why should anyone care I don't know yeah you do you read the story the same as I did come on why why should anyone care about this stuff um in case other people happen to be uh reading your emails perhaps who would do such a thing I don't know certainly not Google for sure but maybe other app developers The Wall Street Journal published this report that says that even though Google swears up and down that they are not reading emails to create new services or app features that the bulk of emails are scanned electronically by computer software but there are no humans doing it as far as they're concerned right but app developers that are a part of Google's Gmail program are allowed to read these emails to create new services or app features and return path is a company a firm that skims emails for data of interest to marketers scanned the inboxes of over 2 million people leaving 8,000 unredacted emails to be read by its employees other marketing companies as well as app makers also have access to Gmail emails now Google's not alone in this practice Microsoft Verizon Oaths Communications which you know Verizon bought out of AOL and all that stuff also let Partners skim their user emails oath was was actually formed out of the Yahoo acquisition says access is considered on a case-by casee basis and requires explicit consent from users which is similar policies that have Microsoft has 25 and current and former employees of app developers and data companies found that the practice of reviewing email data has become really common in the industry Google told the journal that their own employees only read user emails in very specific cases where you ask us to and give us consent or where we need to for security purposes such as investigating a bug or abuse well Google lets any user revoke access to any apps at any point now I've tried to do this and when you do it you have to go to your Google account you have to go through security you have to there are like 10 steps to get at where this stuff is to revoke access to apps it's it's it's not easy it's way easy to allow it click okay it's really difficult to disallow it now in June of last year Google announced that the company would begin serving ads based on a user settings meaning that consumer Gmail accounts would not be used or scanned for ad personalization by Google but here we are and there are all these other app developers and marketing companies that are doing it for them and doing it to their own Advantage so now I'm thinking about how difficult is it to migrate my Google account especially since I'm now a Google customer for Google f and um they uh they just me a huge amount of additional space for drive and email here we are that's the thing is you know every one of these companies that is is an ad supported company at one point or other is doing things to try and optimize for that and sell the data in some way or sell access to the data in some way to create Services it's TR to say it now you if you're if you're not paying for it then you are the product the the difficult thing is figuring out how to be a delist and how to remove yourself from that situation if you so choose you know there are plenty of people that say it's fine to be the product and they're happy with that at the same time I I I think it's reasonable to be concerned about how much data you're allowing out there and how big a Target it can make of you for things in the future that that are no longer okay as they are today you know say attitudes shift and you've got your emails that that are being scanned for one thing and all of a sudden that becomes unpopular now you have to go ahead and scrub your emails or scrub your history or figure out how to undo that it's it's just an awkward situation to have that much data hanging around there and be U be open to so in the past we've run articles about deleting Facebook or deleting cleaning Facebook posts and likes and things like that I'm thinking we may have to figure out how to talk about how to migrate away from Gmail and if if I write that article which I'm strongly thinking about right now you'll find it here on Apple Insider now Andrew have you given any thought to Amazon's fire Cube I mean no I definitely have not I have not been impressed by their their Fire Sticks their other Fire TV stuff and I was like when the CU came out I was immediately underwhelmed and I was I was frankly a little bit annoyed that a lot of people were going to buy this thing because I don't know I mean I'm not trying to be biased against the Apple TV which is completely what I like and use but this thing just is not it's not peing my interest when it comes to set top boxes okay so first of all I know people that love their am Amazon Fire devices I have a fire box the first gen one I had the first gen fire stick um I have set up a bunch of second gen fire sticks for people and there are a couple of things that make fire popular for people first of all it's not a terrible interface it it does have the you know Amazon and Netflix and Hulu and Direct TV and PS View and a sling and a bunch of services that people like on them it has Alexa which if you like Alexa it's great um for a long time the fire box required the use of the button for that but if you had an Alexa device like a DOT or an echko in the house you could use those and then they added the ability finally to be able to send video by voice from the the dot or the echo to the Fire TV and that works well it took them a while to get there and took a while for to get to work very well but it does work the um the combination of the IR Blaster is a good idea I think and I like very much launching things by voice if I can just say you know hey hey Alexa and I'm sorry for trigging anyone who's got a device in the background but hi High whatever open stranger things on Netflix and having it pull up the episode and pick up where I left off that is brilliant I like that a lot and there there are reasons for this thing to exist but their implementation appears to be lacking would you agree oh definitely there there's definitely going to be positives I mean personally I don't use Alexa that much I definitely have a few Alexa devices but they seem almost more annoyances at this point as Siri has continued to grow throughout my life but there's a lot of stuff to like with Alexa and that was probably one of the main things that I was intrigued by them but everything else is just not not doing it for me not doing it for me here so here's why I would hold off on this device it it's using the same processor as the one used in the Raspberry Pi 3 and well that processor works great for a bunch of projects that I run on Raspberry Pi I I have run Cody the uh the video application on you know the media center application on Raspberry Pi using Libra which is a very light OS whose motto is something like just enough OS to run Cody basically they've stripped out everything else so that it's as fast as possible and it's still a little slow because you're asking a lot of a Raspberry Pi and so if that's the chip that they're using for this device they're asking a lot of it because they're trying to run all of Prime video they're trying to run Hulu they're trying to run Netflix and trying to IR blast and manage all of this and manage voice it's it's just too much to really ask of essentially a Raspberry Pi very much so and especially when you compare that to the Apple TV again the 4K is running that I think a10x right now which is what they're running in you know the high-end iPads that's a huge difference in in processors between the two units apps are going to take a long time to load on on Amazon Fire TV the uh the cube it's just I I think the thing to do is if this at all interests you and I think it is intriguing uh wait for a version two they're they're going to have to try and make it suitable for 4K they're going to have to try and and make it really work better they say that when you ask her to find 4K movies that it displays regular HD I I think they've got some work to do yeah and they don't they also don't upgrade any of your purchases I believe they don't do that like they did on the Apple TV when Apple came out with 4K the Apple TV they immediately upgraded any video you had that was available in 4k to 4K and they don't do that on the uh the fire Cube and even if you buy something that's the same price on iTunes you're getting an HD version a lot of the times through the fire Cube versus the Apple TV would give you 4K so even purchase it at the same price you're not even getting the same quality even though it should be capable of it yeah I have a friend who who prefers the Amazon Fire devices he has the Apple TV 4 and when he updated it to the latest IOS 11.4 on it it forgot the pairing with the remote and would not let him click past one of the initial steps that it shows you to re repair the remote he had to dig out a remote for an Apple TV 2 which had the physical remote the mechanical remote and use that press the okay button to get past the uh the steps of setting it up again before he could repair it with the Bluetooth remote he hates that thing and he's he's disappointed with the whole experience because of Siri remote for the Apple 4th gen well as we talked about last time maybe we're going to see some awesome new uh third party remotes they work with the Apple TV I hope so I think that would be interesting and it might even save the experience for people who have that same kind of problem because the Apple TV is a really wonderful device but it's also a very expensive device compared to its competition and little hiccups like that just give people a a really bad taste in their mouth that lingers people remember when something didn't work it does which is why people should be annoyed with the whole Alexa experience on the fire Cube the fact that she's pulling up the wrong stuff that's a huge problem also but you when I used Google home with chomecast to do things by voice again it worked brilliantly so Amazon's got to get there but in terms of the the TV experience itself it's not terrible it's not the worst except when the devices are too slow to actually run it so what we're saying here is first of all it's really slow Hardware the voice control is kind of pants because your your voice doesn't really deliver on that fire Cube the for the the 4K HDR content there's no 4K content they did upgrade it for you and when you try and cast a video it uh it doesn't really work well either right well you don't have you don't have um I don't think you have chomecast or AirPlay obviously with that so any Apple user out there who wants to be able to you like you know we're sitting in the living room I I did this last night we're watching a video on our phone I'm like hey check this out out faith and uh I go to show my girlfriend this video throw it to the TV 2 seconds and then we go back to watching what we were watching it's incredibly easy and seamless and if you I mean you can do it for everything you can mirror the screen of your phone like it's you can work on your computer it's so easy and then there's you know the fire Cube if you've got an Apple device there's still stuff you can do um obviously you can control a lot more stuff through Alexa that way but it just does not have the options that the Apple TV has uh and AirPlay has yeah I uh I have a chomecast here with me while I'm traveling I also have a uh a streaming box that runs Cody an Android box and I used to travel with the Apple TV but it's a kind of a big box to travel with you know you you want something a little smaller and being able to to cast stuff goes a way I ended up putting air server on my Mac and connecting my Mac for a while when I wanted to cter airplay yeah now there's another issue with this which is if you have uh if you have Alexa going and you have the fire Cube and you have a bunch of iot devices in your home that are also Alex compatible like suppose you want to display the video feed from a cloud cam if you tried to do that from your phone it it's it's pretty quick right you have to pull out your phone you have to launch the app you have to wait for it to connect it's about 15 seconds but if you've already got the Alexa fire Cube set up you ought to be able to just ask for it by voice right yeah you would think if the TV is already on that's pretty cool but if the TV isn't on and you have to have the firey Cube turn on the TV it takes about 10 seconds for the feed to show up on your phone and 30 seconds on the so if you were doing a cloud Cam and internally monitoring your house like you know you had a cam set up in the the children's bedroom for example and you heard a noise from the nursery 30 seconds is kind of a long time yeah it's it's it's definitely quite a delay and on the Apple TV side of things since we're going to keep comparing the two um there is no direct option for that so you can't you know while the Apple TV is off I can't ask another Siri device to show it on my Apple TV I can't hold down the Siri button and ask her to show me my feeds there are definitely ways to do it I use homecam on my Apple TV and from when I launched the app to when my feed show up is only like maybe a second but there isn't an a from like a complet powered off TV State and everything I mean I guess at that point it's still going to be quicker if I can just wait for my TV to turn on that time should be the same when I open the app to the time that my home cam my homekit camera show up it is only maybe a second or two of DeLay So I guess even in that regard based on just TV opening and having to open in the app it's still going to be faster on an Apple TV but for such a tight integration between the Amazon Cloud cameras and the cube I would have thought that they would have optimized that a bit more yeah it should work better so you're using homecam as an application on Apple TV to view your homekit compatible cameras yes neat it works really well and they've got a a cool little interface set up so the developer actually made us you can control your other devices at the same time so when I open up like my patio or my dining room in home cam I can actually control the other devices in the room so it's like little like it's like a tap or a hold or something and it brings up all the lights and everything yeah so I can like while watching the camera feed I can adjust my devices so if I'm watching The Patio I'm like wait what's going on on my patio is that like something getting into something hold on let me turn on my patio lights oh yep that's a thing and then I could I think I can even use uh I could pull my phone and us like the 2way communication which I don't think works through homecam but um I could always you know run outside to yell at the raccoon or something thing but it's nice enough to be able to like turn on the lights when I'm looking through my camera and it's really really nicely done uh really good way to watch them on your Apple TV very cool well my next big adventure with homekit is making a non- homekit ceiling fan a non-smart ceiling fan into a homekit compatible ceiling fan so I'm I'm still working through that what uh way you going there's a few different options you've got there well you you need to give me some advice about what my options are because what I've done so far is I've put in a Bluetooth controller into the ceiling fan and uh have been trying to use homebridge for that yeah so I mean you can use the Bluetooth controller for that straight through homebridge I believe you could use um an off the shelf um uh remote kit a lot of them sell those and then use a make a homekit IR Blaster with homebridge and then there's going to be a couple different companies out there like I devices I think has one launching this year that is an actual just wall switch replacement so you swap out your wall and do that right and that's where I'm really going eventually but but the Bluetooth one was a Bluetooth remote kit that was an off-the-shelf kit M and the I it worked with the Bluetooth app and getting homebridge to control it worked somewhat it was uh there it's a little hit or miss on in terms of its signaling but for the most part it worked fine and um my real issue is with homebridge instability yeah well I guess there's not much you can do do with that in the the short term but maybe we'll see some remotes that are capable of controlling those in the future um again yeah who knows well I'm looking forward to the uh the I devices product I have asked them where that is and I have not gotten a word back from their PR rep yeah I can't get a firm answer either other than I think I think they're still aiming for this year but they've definitely miss Targets in the past I remember my excitement for their their button there just going to be a wall sticking but it was going to be the first like homekit button that was out there they would just stick on your wall of course now we've got ones from Elgato Eve we've got the Logitech p we've got the Hue buttons that work the tap and the dimmer switch we've got the one from fibaro got lots of different options out there at this point but that was going to be one of the first ones and then when it launched they stripped out the homekit functionality and it would only control the I devices products and it's like okay all the other ones support homekit and then you have this one switch that won't work with any other homekit devices so that was a bit of a bummer absolutely well I want to go ahead and bring this show to a close we're going to wrap things up here Andrew where can people find you on the internet can always find me on appleinsider.com and they can reach out to me on Twitter at Andrew U and people should totally email us with listener questions I I had a question earlier this week from someone on Twitter asking me about what to do with a 17inch MacBook Pro that seems to have a broken GPU in it and you know there there are all kinds of listener questions we are ready to try and help answer and bring up on the show for that person the answer was to wrap the MacBook Pro in a blanket to see if I can get the screen to come on and then install uh gfx which is a graphics selector tool and then force it to use the integrated Intel chip which isn't burnt up and then turn that laptop into a server so there are all kinds of neat things we can discuss go ahead and let us know how we're doing please go ahead and email us please go ahead and leave reviews on iTunes we like hearing from you and we will be back next week Andrew I'll see you then talk to you later Victor\n"