The Future of HomeKit and Smart Home Automation

HomeKit has been a topic of interest among smart home enthusiasts and Apple fans alike, with many speculating about its potential to revolutionize the way we control our homes. In this article, we'll explore some of the exciting developments in the world of HomeKit and how it may change the face of smart home automation.

Apple's plans for HomeKit are ambitious, with a focus on creating a seamless and integrated experience across devices. According to Andrew Urich, who joined us recently, "being able to use these third-party remotes, like the Logitech Harmony, or even consumer-level products, could be a game-changer". He believes that this integration will enable users to control their HomeKit devices with ease, using a variety of remote controls and interfaces.

One area where HomeKit is expected to make a significant impact is in home entertainment. Andrew notes that "controlling home entertainment is one of those things people like to do as part of home automation". He envisions a future where users can easily switch inputs on their receivers, turn on video sources, and control other devices with ease, all using a single remote or interface. This could be achieved through the use of HomeKit-enabled devices that can communicate with each other seamlessly.

The integration of Siri Remote and HomePod is also expected to play a significant role in the future of HomeKit. According to Andrew, "it's going to be very interesting to see what we'll be able to do". He believes that users will be able to use their Siri Remotes or HomePods to access their Crestron media library and control their HomeKit devices with ease.

The development of new HomeKit-enabled products is also expected to accelerate, thanks to Apple's revamped developer kit. Andrew notes that "the new dev kit has drastically cut down cycle times for MFi partners", allowing them to get prototypes up and running in as little as three months. This could lead to a flood of new products hitting the market, making HomeKit even more accessible to users.

One area where HomeKit is already showing promise is in the realm of IR blasters. Andrew notes that "IR blasters working through HomeKit could be a big deal", enabling users to control devices like TVs, fans, and AC units with ease. He also envisions a future where these devices can be integrated into scenes, allowing users to create complex automations with ease.

The potential for HomeKit to transform the way we live in our homes is significant. By providing a seamless and integrated experience across devices, Apple aims to make smart home automation more accessible and user-friendly. With new products and features on the horizon, it's clear that HomeKit is here to stay, and its impact will be felt in the world of smart home automation for years to come.

Changes to HomeKit in iOS 12

In a recent article, we explored some of the changes to HomeKit in iOS 12. One of the most significant developments is the introduction of a new dev kit for MFi partners. According to Apple, this dev kit will "drastically cut down cycle times" for developers, allowing them to get prototypes up and running in as little as three months. This could lead to a flood of new products hitting the market, making HomeKit even more accessible to users.

The new dev kit also includes significant improvements to software authentication. According to Andrew, "basically just what they're using to set all that stuff up is a lot more work". He notes that this development will enable developers to create more complex and secure automations, further enhancing the capabilities of HomeKit.

Andrew's experience with HomeBridge tinkering has given him insight into the needs of HomeKit enthusiasts. He notes that one area where people have been requesting improvements is in IR blasters and Harmony control. Apple's introduction of HomeKit-enabled devices that can communicate with each other seamlessly may address these requests, enabling users to create complex automations with ease.

Conclusion

The future of HomeKit holds much promise for smart home enthusiasts and Apple fans alike. With its focus on seamless integration, automation, and user-friendliness, HomeKit is poised to revolutionize the way we live in our homes. As new products and features continue to emerge, it's clear that HomeKit is here to stay, and its impact will be felt in the world of smart home automation for years to come.

Reviews and Feedback

As always, Andrew encourages readers to share their thoughts and feedback on the Apple Insider podcast. He notes that he loves hearing from readers and is always happy to answer questions or provide additional information. For those who want to get involved, Andrew invites listeners to email him at news@appleinsider.com or reach out on social media using his handles @AndrewU and @Vmarks.

Follow us on social media for the latest updates and discussions about HomeKit and smart home automation. We're always here to help and provide information, so don't hesitate to reach out!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor and joining me is Andrew O'Hara what's going on Victor well I am once again recording from the bunker underneath the Apple Insider headquarters uh Far East Edition and I really appreciate you being available to join me here yeah of course no problem now I should mention if you love music and you love comedy you love Weird Al Yankovic would you agree with that statement I I think that's a pretty fair statement and if you've ever seen Weird Al play Live you know that he puts on an incredible show so he just wrapped up his ridiculously self-indulgent ill-advised vanity tour where for the first time he played his original songs he he you know this he's he's apparently not performed those in concert before he performed dare to be stupid buy me a condo and and more and there were 77 performances on this tour and every show was unique with a different set list they were all professionally mixed and mastered and they have Al's impromptu song stage banter with Stitcher premium not only do you get weirdal ridiculously self-indulgent ill-advised vanity tour but you also get access to 21,000 hours of original content exclusive bonus episodes of your favorite podcasts adree archives hundreds of standup comedy albums and more for a free month of Stitcher premium go to Stitcher premium.com weirdal and use the promo code Apple I don't know that's that's actually kind of interesting that's kind of we should totally do that yeah I think I mean we we should use that promo code I I think I I think I'm going to do that I'm going to put aside my work for the day and start listening to some of that absolutely but before we do that we need to talk about the news so ming quo who actually uh totally left where he formerly was employed I believe and is now out doing his own thing I'm not sure I have that entirely right but I know that he left where he was being an analyst before so he is back again with the new report and he's trying to answer investors questions about the 2018 product lineup That is the lineup that we're going to see for iPhones coming up this fall the previous reports are still the same but there are some new tidbits that we can get from this quo is expecting a new lower priced MacBook error which he'd mentioned before in March also still expected is an Apple Watch that's approxim the same size but with a larger screen so you know the the same physical size on the wrist but growing the border of the screen closer to the edge kind of thing and in his most recent note he also wrote about the 2018 phone lineup where the previous claims are still there but he expects that the Innovations in the space aren't clear to the supply chain until it's going to be very close to release and that kind of matches up with the reality we know right yeah I think all that sounds pretty believable there's nothing too outlanding is in in this report I mean supply chain people tend to get orders for parts and for them to piece together what the capabilities are or what the product is out of that is not always easy basically he uh he believes that Apple's growth is probably going to come from replacement demands in the high-end market and new users on the low end so that that we're going to see um the replacement for the iPhone 10 for example being a growth item slow growth is there We Believe apple is still the leading company in the Consumer Electronics sector and has surpassed its competitors by a wide margin in terms of innovative user experience and ecosystem development the leading advantages will benefit when innovating with new applications so the three models that are still speculated to arrive in the fall are two models with OLED screens that's a 6.5 in and a 5.8 in and a third that is an LCD screen at 6.1 in they all will probably have the true death camera array and use face ID but the LCD model will be singled out as a cost-effective model and one of the things that you know we've seen people talk about has been the concept of a phone without 3D touch I've been reading rumors about that kind of thing as well and we think that pegatron is identified as taking 60% of the LCD orders now back in January Tim Cook issued some caution you know reports in January claimed that Apple cut its iPhone 10 production citing slower than expected holiday claims on February 1st Apple revealed that continued to prove impr the holiday quarter Revenue year on year although iPhone sales dropped a little bit um I I think what we're seeing here is is just the kind of way the cycle is going to become that Apple's making a transition among devices adding to capabilities devices moving everyone off of home button moving everyone to face ID and uh at the same time sort of straddling this keeping older devices going keeping older devices well supported and and even in production you agre that kind of assessment yeah yeah I do you know we we see this where where apple is sort of straddling these two big things where Apple's making these these brand new devices uh and getting everything for the you know most of the US market and most of the World Market off of home buttons and onto face ID at the same time Apple just started mass production of the iPhone 6s in India the uh the iPhone 6s is for sale there alongside the iPhone SE and with opened up a facility there to manufacture it so that they can avoid import duties basically things that are made in country aren't subject to import duties so they bring a factory there and everyone's happy that there's now local employment there the uh the 6s and the 6s plus will be made there and um that's that's kind of interesting because the 6s is gosh a phone that was new when we started making this podcast a couple of years ago I mean it's been a while hasn't it it's been been quite a while but I mean at least we're still seeing Apple continue to support it I mean when iOS 12 launches this ball at least we're still going to see it running on a lot of those I mean it runs on everything that iOS 11 ran on so it's definitely interesting to see them really starting to try to support like those older handsets not only just keeping them around but like you said keeping them in production and continuing to pump out more of them yeah I I was really actually um excited about the concept that iOS 12 will keep these older with good performance I felt like they were both answering the question about is Apple trying to make my phone slow from the battery debacle and at the same time saying that you don't have to worry these phones aren't going away they're going to feel as good as they possibly can yeah I think it's it's definitely a a statement against Android phones that don't get those updates they're trying to push those updates you know for phones as old as they can when that 6s came out I mean we're several OS iterations later and it definitely looks embarrassing when you look at the competition's ability to upgrade their phones yeah well I mean that's two years on right there was the seven and the eight and and 10 at that point so it's it's a big deal and I've been struggling with this Android thing for a while now for example I have an exus 6p that stops at Android 8 it won't get Android 9 uh I'm I'm looking around here at Android TV stuff because people are trying to say Now's the Time to buy TVs you know the the World Cup is going going on and and so there's a lot of promos for that kind of thing and you see TV manufacturers are shipping televisions with Android 6 on them and and well Google's done a decent job of making it so that applications can run across different levels of the OS I just you know you shake your head and you wonder why because the um Android TV on boxes is now in beta for Android 8 it's getting Oreo a bunch of them skipped getting seven of course 8 has big improvements in terms of being able to separate out manufacturer customizations from the OS build so that it's easier to do updates in the future but only now we're getting eight for Android TVs as betas when they're issuing nine for the phones it's kind of Madness it really drove me crazy before I was on Verizon so I couldn't get like the original iPhones and I had uh a couple Droid handsets and it it drove me bonkers when like an a big update would come out that they'd announc a whole thing and then you know you don't get it you have to wait for you had to wait for Google to send it to the manufacturer to the carrier before they would issue it so I mean if you wanted any of those new features you really had to figure out a way to install it yourself um but it drove me crazy like I mean obviously I want to jump on the new stuff you know we're running the betas on our phone now and I always want those new things and for with Android even when they're publicly released it was impossible to get on my handsets and it was it was really frustrating yeah the only way to get a good Android update is to have a a pixel or or Nexus formerly yeah a Google phone buy a fresh phone yeah yep and and even then you're not guaranteed anything at all really you know the the Nexus 6p is 2 years old I believe maybe three at the most and and I've got eight on it and can't go to nine when Apple is sitting here supporting phones much older yeah it it seems like a problem but what do you do well what you do is if you're Apple you go ahead and figure out how to get foxcon and widraw to open up factories around the world where you want them right so they've got the widraw factory in India that we just mentioned and foxcon is opening up a big display Factory in Wisconsin now the the interesting thing that's been in the news this week has been that the foxcon factory is not really a sweet deal for the taxpayers there and basically the the thing is this is A10 billion Factory and the state and Municipal sweeteners they kicked in a billion dollars in benefits above an existing incentive package that they said was worth three billion so that's 4 billion they're in for and the state is responsible for covering 40% of the public bonds used to finance all the local expenses in the event that the project Falls over and it's it's just it looks like you know that foxcon got a really sweet deal out of this because the locals pledged a bunch the state pledged a bunch and what's foxc con's exposure here you know it feels like they've managed to lessen their risk and put a lot of it on the state which is an interesting position would you agree I I agree I mean they definitely were able to really lower their liability but I mean in the kind of the current US political climate there's a a lot of interest in that us manufacturing so they kind of had you know a lot of Leverage there like oh we'll do it but you really got to want it so they had to cough out a lot of stuff to make it happen and I'm sure Wisconsin wanted to be the one that got a huge manufacturing facility I mean they they really wanted it they had to put a lot down to get that to happen and and they got a lot of good press out of it but yet it doesn't seem like quite the deal that people were thinking that it was yeah so 30% of foxcon total investment in the plant 1.5 billion in state income tax credits for the jobs created 1.35 billion in credits for capital investment 150 million in sales tax exemptions on construction materials no corporate taxes on profits from sales on products made here so it's it's going to cost the state about 200 million a year and in addition to that another 764 million in incentives approved by Mount Pleasant and racing County 134 million for the Improvement of State highways and local roads near the site so it's going to take what 15 to 50 years to pay off via personal income taxes on people working there it's it's um you know it's one of these things where without getting too far into politics it's always a debate about how much the states should sweeten the deal or counties and local governments should sweeten the deal for companies to lure them to come you know if if everybody does it then you have to do it to compete and that's you know why South Carolina has the BMW plant versus another state for example but if no one does it then States just that then then companies just go to whatever climate is most welcoming based on the the default playing field of course that's unrealistic because then all it takes is one state to break ranks and you end up where we are now yeah pretty much I know we saw that a ton with uh when Amazon's looking for their second facility just States bending over backwards renaming towns offering money like so many things trying to get them to come there and it's insane what they're doing just to to try to get them to move to a certain location it it really is and there are tons of KnockOn effects that people don't consider well uh in terms of now that you've made this big draw so your housing costs become more expensive in the area and in turn other costs become more expensive and so now the people that live there to begin with can no longer afford to live there it it sort of sets in motion things that change the whole landscape of a of a city the whole makeup of a city and and Seattle underwent that with Amazon and and before Amazon underwent that with Microsoft where it really changed in a big way the affordability of living in Seattle which changes the character of a place let's talk about headphones who who's your favorite headphone manufacturer oh gosh I don't even I don't even know if I have a favorite headphone manufacturer I've got a lot I I switch between them all the time there's right now I'm really liking the um the Libras hone zip track I think it's like the track Plus or something like that really yes right those are the earbuds yeah yeah with the Adaptive noise cancelling those are really cool so I've been really liking those um we've been playing around with a new master and dynamic mw50 plus that has the swapable ear cups yeah those are those are some really really nice headphones um I actually have sitting on here my my Marshall headphones which I they they sound really cool and they have a very distinct visual quality to them they look really retro and stuff so I I love my Marshall headphones I've got a lot of headphones going on here I hate headphones I do the the problem that I have with headphones is uh frequently the clamping force of the headband you know if I'm wearing it for more than 10 minutes and it starts to hurt on my head because the clamping force is too tight forget it I'm wearing some Bowers and& Wilkins uh P5 Series 2 right now and I had to put them over a wide stack of books to try and stretch the headband out enough that it was comfortable my favorite set are a pair of what's called electrostats and they're a sort of electrostatic module in combination with the neodymium module and they sound really good and they're so comfortable and but you know your favorite headphone company in mine beats was slapped with a lawsuit what was the lawsuit about well I believe it was another one of the you know who I guess he claimed to be a co-founder right of actual beats and was this before they they started working with monster originally before they kicked monster away to join Apple so beats started a long long long time ago right the idea initially was said to have started in the ear in the mid 2000s so this guy Steven Lamar says that and in his lawsuit he says that he had this idea for a headphone brand endorsed by celebrities and he brought it to Dre and and Jimmy ien in 2006 and beats founding was influenced by Apple even before it bought beats in 2014 Robert Brunner the former Apple director of industrial design joined the firm pentagram was involved in the initial talks as was Apple retail VP Jerry McDougall uh beats ultim like ultimately like to distribute his headphones through monster instead of Apple at that time and the partners had a falling out they reached settlement under which yven and Dre would retain ownership of the brand named Beats by Dre and get 20% % royalty on gross sales Lamar and J would seed intellectual property rights for a 5% royalty rate and an equity interest in beats that was due them for contributions to the business model product Concepts brand Ed unded iconic designs things like that and the lawsuit was just about how much Dre and and uh even owned in royalties including profits gleaned from the $3 billion acquisition sale in 2014 so he was seeking more than 100 million bucks for his contributions and the defendants both of whom testified at the trial argued that he was only entitled to royalties from one headphone model the Beat Studio the first model the thing is when you go to court especially when you go in front of a jury you you leave yourself open to results that may happen differently than you think they'll go and so a jury found Lamar was entitled to 25,2 47,3 in royalties related to three models the studio 2 remastered the studio 2 Wireless and the studio 3 all of which are models that are of course based on the original studio so he he didn't get anything from like the solo or the Solo HD or or any of the other ones but for the studio for that first model the uh the overe ear set they went for all of them now in a related case Apple filed a countersuit against him also in 2014 for claiming co-founder status in order to launch his own headphone Brands during a period when new headphone Brands were launching on a regular basis that suit was actually dismissed in 2015 so it's it's interesting you don't always win on every suit but sometimes you win and you win reasonably big now this case is not the only case concerning beats and its Founders monster products their original manufacturing partner also sued beats into Apple in early 2015 and that suit is one that's still going on we haven't heard the last of it Monster is uh is no Le's Pro you know project it's his company and he he's done crazy things like he had a Super Bowl commercial you remember that one no I don't oh my gosh no he was in this year's Super Bowl in the commercials they ran monster ran a commercial and it was really a weird one because it it sort of it told the story through flashback of a a kid acting out no's life story acting out no Le's life story of of founding monster and and stuff like that and then the end shot was of no Lee himself the man actually driving the kid playing no Lee around uh as if he were his own chauffeur and and you know uh future self talking to past self saying you've come a long way kid or you've got a long way to go kid or something like that I can't remember it's been since January since I've thought about it but it was a really weird thing and uh and I met him at CES he's kind of an interesting dude he everywhere he goes is on a custom painted segue I mean so we were in a club and and no Lee who's a big dude rolls up on his segue with with hot rod Flames Point painted on the Segway fenders and that's that's the kind of guy that we're talking about here is an interesting dude and they launched a cryptocurrency called Monster money not too long ago and and so you know we're going to get into talking about monster cryptocurrency at some point here but not today today we're talking about the 25 mil that was awarded to this fell who brought the concept to Dre in 2006 what do you think about that stuff man I mean it seems like he definitely it it definitely got split in the middle I think I think that seems pretty fair considering what they were both asking for I mean you know Lamar is looking for a whole lot more out of that giant acquisition that he got in um but if they're going to buy that really the only thing that he came up with was the studio I think it's fair that he gets compensation for all of the the studio models and not all of the the huge line of beat stuff that's that's come since then yeah it makes sense and and especially since those Studio models have the same ID more or less they've those have pretty much remained unchange since other than you know few small changes but pretty much the same yeah now you mentioned your Marshall headphones a minute ago so so you've got a review coming up that we're going to publish eventually and by eventually I mean probably around Saturday or so of a marshall speaker yes tell me about this thing a little bit so I've got a couple of them here I've got the stanmore and the Acton and these are their Wireless multi-room versions so they've had their standard Bluetooth ones out for a while which I was definitely a fan of have a couple of them already and they came out with these Wireless versions late towards last year and they have AirPlay as well as chomecast and other stuff built in which is really nice but I was really interested in the way they did their multi-room things and what slightly frustrated me is they have not committed to Bringing AirPlay 2 they're kind of taking the approach of we have our own multi-room solution and it's better than airpl 2 because you don't have to use your phone to toggle between you know single and multi- room options and I think that's the wrong approach I think they 100% that okay so hold up CU I I have yet to experience these guys tell me what it is that they're doing to do multiroom because you mentioned that they've got chomecast built in and chomecast does multiroom MHM and you mentioned AirPlay and and airplay on its own AirPlay 1 is not exactly multiroom but never mind so how are they doing multiroom are they using the chomecast stuff that's built in to pull it off or are they doing their own flavor even though they've got Chromecast they've got a lot of of Google stuff in there I mean when you have to set these up originally you have to go through the Google home app so they could be using the chomecast to do it but I'm not certain they claim it's like their own way way of doing it but they have a physical button on the actual speakers that you can press to toggle between single and multi and whenever you put them into multi they just link up and they all start playing the same thing and it does work really really well it's kind of awesome I mean if you have a bunch of these around you just press the button or you can do it from your phone um in the Marshall multi room app you can toggle between single and multi for each individual speaker but you just hit the button on there so you don't even need your phone if you're playing something through one of them switch it to multi switch the rest to multi and they all start playing the same thing so in that regard it works really really well but what I was annoyed with was they seem to ignore the other benefits of AirPlay 2 they focus only on that multi- room option and act like that's the only thing that's going on and I think there's a lot more to airplay too so while their multi-room stuff does work well it works really well really simple to use setup very easy to understand I still wish they would put air 2 in there and right now they still just they keep putting it off saying our multiroom solution is better we're still thinking about airpl 2 okay so so what do you want them to do that AirPlay 2 does well there's a couple things that airpl airpl 2 does other than just multi room so one they have a bigger buffer in there which does take up more onboard memory but you're going to get a lot less drops in audio which still happens with AirPlay 1 and even with their current solution I definitely had a couple instances in their multi room setup where like like audio for literally just a split second though it would drop out from one of the speakers and then pick back up and it can be a little it doesn't happen often but it happened a few times during my testing in the last couple weeks just dropped out from one side and then pop back up and using a bigger buffer is going to stop that stuff from happening second of all especially for homekit users AirPlay 2 and homekit support those speakers will show up in the home app they can be assigned to different rooms and you can use Siri to control the playback so I can just ask Siri to play um my favorite Eagle songss in the living room and it can pop up on my living room speakers and start playing and I would love to be able to do that and not I mean I could do it from my homepod and send it to my other airpl 2 speakers which would be nice if it included the Marshall ones and those are not things that they can do with just AirPlay one all right so here's here's my request of you which is two two things one is if you had a chomecast audio device and they 30 bucks you you know could you put one of those in and use it with Marshall's multiroom stuff which would be interesting and indicative of whether or not they're using chomecast to pull it off and the second part would be you trying the Google assistant app to control the multi-room stuff because they obviously have chomecast built in and seeing how that goes and you can use the Google assistant app from your uh iPhone yeah and we're still finishing up the review um definitely still a lot more I haven't jumped into all of our audio tests that I want to run yet so we're definitely going to try track that down a little bit more and see if they are I have a few other multi-room speakers that claim to have that multi-room support um one's the lotson which is a new one coming from Urban ears so that does that pretty much uses the same exact thing um for their multi-room stuff so I'm going to definitely be testing out to see if that can interface with the Marshall ones um and if it does that's a a great benefit to their multi- room but it still doesn't solve the issues that we're seeing without airpl 2 yeah one of the other things that I do I'm audio testing is to put a microphone at a at a set distance from the speaker and to play back specific frequencies through the speaker and then see how those frequencies are detected with the mic to uh be able to to get a proper response curve you know to see what frequencies are actually playing and at what volume levels and and that gives me a feeling for how I feel about the speaker compared to other things that I've got yeah I've I had I've used their their acting their stand Moore um I can't remember what their little guy is um Stockwell maybe I've used them for a while and I I really do like the audio that comes out of them I think it sounds really nice and I really like their controls that you have it's not a ton of control you can control the treble and the base but I do like that you have some degree of variation there to really tune into your taste yeah and I got to say you know have you tried it next to a homepod cuz that's what our listeners question is going to be oh absolutely I definitely have I think the homep Pod is a little more bass heavy I mean that's the biggest one um and probably my biggest complaint about the homepod I hate the Bas on it which I know is going to be a divisive statement because a lot of people like it but I listen to a lot of podcasts um like this one and I watch a lot of uh TV through there and it is just way too messy um to work with TV just it's it's too too crazy doesn't work yeah well we will look for that review and I'm hoping every one of our listeners gets a chance to read it um I'm looking forward to hearing about it myself and tell me more about that multi room and try out the Google assistant and see if that's what they're doing because it's it's always interesting to know how they're pulling off that stunt absolutely absolutely in other court news because we were talking about courts a minute ago the Apple versus Samsung patent trial is finally and completely over I still don't believe it I don't I don't I no there's no way you can cry yourself to sleep at night you can rock yourself to sleep at night knowing that qualcom is still going on okay I feel a little bit better now another major long-going lawsuit is continuing okay good so both parties here Samsung and Apple agreed to settle any remaining claims and counter claims as a result the court denied Apple's motion for supplemental damages as well as pre- and post judgment interest according to documents filed through the US District Court for the Northern District of California Samsung for its part is giving up motions to invalidate Apple's 915 patent and seek alternative relief and toss a recent verdict so the exact terms of the deal have not been made public but after days of deliberating deliberating a federal jurly handed down its most recent decision regarding the Apple V Samsung case declaring the South Korean Tech Giant owes 533 mil 31666 for infringing on Apple's iPhone design patents another 5.3 million was awarded for two utility patents and Samsung lawyer John Quinn told judge Lucy Co that he had some issues with the verdict that would be addressed in post-trial motions based on these filings it appears that Quinn's concerns have been addressed or dismissed they've taken care of it this is over it's still hard to believe after all these years that it's actually over and it seems I'm I'm like emotionally invested in this trial at this point and it feels like almost like a for us onlookers it's almost like a unsatisfying outcome like I want to know like okay Apple lost Apple won um how much was owed by either party whatever it's going to be like that outcome and now we're left like almost like a cliffhanger like no we don't know how it ended I mean we sorted look Apple originally wanted a full $1 billion for the infringement and Samsung had previously advised it was willing to pay 28 mil and like happens in these kinds of things right that's somewhat of a negotiation you you throw out one number they throw out another number and you land somewhere in the middle and you know what you did get out of this was you got you know Adam Ball and Susan car um arguing about the merits of Apple's design patents you got people siding with Apple's legal team in viewing granted designs as applicable you you got a lot out of this and at the end of the day you don't have to know the exact numbers and you don't have to know that that Apple crushed their foes and you know defeated them victoriously in battle right you you don't have to have that kind of satisfaction because at the end of the day there's still actually business partners right Samsung is making displays Samsung wants to make the A113 chip they they have to work together despite this stuff so this was just business this was literally just about how much money was going to be paid and how much was going to happen so they didn't do it again kind of thing absolutely we I mean it's been it's been enjoyable to read about whether you side with apple or or Samsung you know I wasn't convinced that Apple really needed to win a billion dollars from that original settlement um but it definitely has given us a lot to read we've seen a lot of uh you know expert testimony from you know original designers and stuff come out it's been very interesting to to read and see over all of these years so I'm glad it's come to a close but it's a little bit Bittersweet you know if you if you want to be really unsatisfied if you want to be really dissatisfied the closing arguments are what you need to go over so Apple's lawyer Joe Mueller reiterated expert witness points saying the fact you can pull apart a phone means absolutely absolutely nothing the question is what did they apply those designs to it's not a paint of glass it's not a display screen that doesn't show a goey it's the phone by contrast Samsung's lawyer John Quinn said to the jury the apple design patents do not cover anything on the inside of the phones they don't even cover the entire outside under the law Apple's not entitled to profits of any article of manufacturer to which the design was not applied so their their closing arguments were still pretty much at loggerheads on this that they were able to agree and conclude this thing is probably very smart because they were paying tons in legal fees just keeping this thing going and you know judge Lucy CO's got to be tired of it too oh yeah I'm sure she is so you know she is forever going to be known as the judge for Apple at this point or the judge the judge on this case at this point so it's good to have moved on I think I I think it's definitely good now some some Joker wrote an article on our site some terrible guy I don't know about thirdparty remote platform support for Syrian iOS 12 and TV2 you you got anything to say about that rude person that that terrible reprobate of an individual um I do not have a single nice thing to say about him what about his article well who first of first of all let our listeners in on the Joe who is that guy okay that was me I definitely wrote that I wrote that earlier this week so thank you very much Victor um what what are you trying to teach us about here tell us tell us what's going on yeah so of all the things that kind of came out during the Keynote at Apple's Dev conference was this one kind of line just stuck with me and it was just uh federi mentioning that the remotes for the Apple TV that you they would now work with more thirdparty remotes and would even include series support and it was like oh that's pretty cool and I mean even since then we've learned that remotes are actually going to be a new category of homekit products which opens up even more possibilities but the the problem is at least right now we know know very little about what capabilities are going to be possible here and it really got me just started thinking of all the different ways that this could pan out um probably a lot more you know profound than they're actually going to be but Apple's released very little information about what we can expect here the only thing we really know is that many different companies like Savant and Creston and control 4 have all more or less signed on to support this and you'll be able to use their remote systems to control the Apple TV including using Siri so just using that as a base we can automatically know a few things such as now these third party remotes can control airpl 2 speakers and the homepod and all stuff like that and it just kind of can Branch out about what we can really expect here and I think it's going to be a lot more of a big deal than it kind of seemed during the keynote yeah so control 4 if if you have a control 4 system you've a spent a ton of money and but b a ton of money on license fees but control 4 lets you control pretty much everything in the house it acts as a home media server it acts as a receiver it can do all the home automation stuff and in the past if you had a control 4 and wanted to control an Apple TV you programmed the infrared remote codes into it so that it could go ahead and blast IR at your Apple TV or you you had it imitate the Apple TV remote through Bluetooth it was possible to go ahead and have it control an Apple TV in the past I think what's really new here is being able to control all the homekit devices and really be able to do series support so that through your Creston you can um you know use your Siri remote or or Siri from homepod and access your Crestron media library it it kind of goes both directions I think yeah I think it's going to be very interesting to see what we'll be able to do I mean obviously anyone who's you know followed the site in our YouTube channel for a while knows how much homekit stuff that I love to talk about and being able to either use these third party remotes I mean it doesn't have to be something as high-end as these as the control 4 and the cres and stuff it can be more consumer level like the like the Logitech Harmony we'd be able to hopefully see kind of integrate with this but so those things could control your homekit devices those could show up on your screen and control them just like on your iOS device but we also could see maybe like IR blasters working through homekit so if we had you know hopefully nice working versions of those compared to some of the really cheap ones but I can see you know Elgato coming out with an eve IR Blaster that could control your TV or a fan or an AC unit um anything that works through a remote and you could include those in scenes which could be a big deal because you could finally have your TV turn off with your good night scene so there's a lot of ways this could play out absolutely and and you know controlling home entertainment is one of those things people like to do as part of home automation being able to set the input on a receiver and turn on the video source and all these things is is obnoxious to do across four or five remotes and even HDMI C doesn't take care of it so Apple TV and homekit being able to control those things gets better you know it's one of the things that Neil Hughes has been doing using homebridge to talk to Harmony to try and pull that off over here I've been using Alexa with a Harmony remote lead setup to be able to do the same kind of thing seeing that finally talk to homekit properly would be a lot of fun yeah I would be really excited um I know in my home bridge tinkering that was one of the big things that a lot of people did was set up IR blasters or add the harmony control they're clearly wanted by people and I guess my biggest concern right now before I get ahead of myself with all these lofly expectations is when we're actually going to see anything I mean when we saw Apple ad Sprinklers and water control valves to iOS 11 that didn't ship until I think iOS uh 112 or 113 earlier this year so that was super delayed and then you also have the just the time to market for an average homekit accessory it can take easily a year before they get everything figured out um also I did this piece earlier this week on changes to home kit in iOS 12 and one of those things is they actually have a wholly new revamped dev kit for those mfi Partners that's supposed to drastically cut down those cycle times so they say you can get a prototype going within maybe a week and release time can be you can have a functional you know product to Market in maybe three months compared to the year or more that it's been taking now so I'm hoping one that Apple actually includes this in iOS 12 and then two we actually see products hit the market quicker rather than a year and a half from when Apple actually announces it right and that dev kit was that talking about the software authentication as well yeah basically just what they're using to yeah to set all that stuff up a lot more work is done through that dev kit than it was in the past and I think it just does a lot more of those homekit layers um hopefully cutting down the development time on new homekit products nice very nice cool well I think we are pretty much out of time that sounds good I've talked about all I want to talk about have you talked about anything you want to talk about no I think I'm good I mean I'm working on those I get those reviews to to finish up so everyone can check uh the written review as well as the video review uh this weekend fantastic well that's all we got going on here um Andrew thank you so much for joining us yeah of course no problem anytime where can people find you on the internet well they can follow me at Andrew U over on Twitter or obviously on the Apple Insider YouTube channel and uh the website and I'm at V marks on Twitter I encourage people to go ahead and email us at newsapple insider.com we are happy to take questions we love when you leave us reviews and we love when you ask us questions we will be back next week with more on the Apple Insider podcast nyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor and joining me is Andrew O'Hara what's going on Victor well I am once again recording from the bunker underneath the Apple Insider headquarters uh Far East Edition and I really appreciate you being available to join me here yeah of course no problem now I should mention if you love music and you love comedy you love Weird Al Yankovic would you agree with that statement I I think that's a pretty fair statement and if you've ever seen Weird Al play Live you know that he puts on an incredible show so he just wrapped up his ridiculously self-indulgent ill-advised vanity tour where for the first time he played his original songs he he you know this he's he's apparently not performed those in concert before he performed dare to be stupid buy me a condo and and more and there were 77 performances on this tour and every show was unique with a different set list they were all professionally mixed and mastered and they have Al's impromptu song stage banter with Stitcher premium not only do you get weirdal ridiculously self-indulgent ill-advised vanity tour but you also get access to 21,000 hours of original content exclusive bonus episodes of your favorite podcasts adree archives hundreds of standup comedy albums and more for a free month of Stitcher premium go to Stitcher premium.com weirdal and use the promo code Apple I don't know that's that's actually kind of interesting that's kind of we should totally do that yeah I think I mean we we should use that promo code I I think I I think I'm going to do that I'm going to put aside my work for the day and start listening to some of that absolutely but before we do that we need to talk about the news so ming quo who actually uh totally left where he formerly was employed I believe and is now out doing his own thing I'm not sure I have that entirely right but I know that he left where he was being an analyst before so he is back again with the new report and he's trying to answer investors questions about the 2018 product lineup That is the lineup that we're going to see for iPhones coming up this fall the previous reports are still the same but there are some new tidbits that we can get from this quo is expecting a new lower priced MacBook error which he'd mentioned before in March also still expected is an Apple Watch that's approxim the same size but with a larger screen so you know the the same physical size on the wrist but growing the border of the screen closer to the edge kind of thing and in his most recent note he also wrote about the 2018 phone lineup where the previous claims are still there but he expects that the Innovations in the space aren't clear to the supply chain until it's going to be very close to release and that kind of matches up with the reality we know right yeah I think all that sounds pretty believable there's nothing too outlanding is in in this report I mean supply chain people tend to get orders for parts and for them to piece together what the capabilities are or what the product is out of that is not always easy basically he uh he believes that Apple's growth is probably going to come from replacement demands in the high-end market and new users on the low end so that that we're going to see um the replacement for the iPhone 10 for example being a growth item slow growth is there We Believe apple is still the leading company in the Consumer Electronics sector and has surpassed its competitors by a wide margin in terms of innovative user experience and ecosystem development the leading advantages will benefit when innovating with new applications so the three models that are still speculated to arrive in the fall are two models with OLED screens that's a 6.5 in and a 5.8 in and a third that is an LCD screen at 6.1 in they all will probably have the true death camera array and use face ID but the LCD model will be singled out as a cost-effective model and one of the things that you know we've seen people talk about has been the concept of a phone without 3D touch I've been reading rumors about that kind of thing as well and we think that pegatron is identified as taking 60% of the LCD orders now back in January Tim Cook issued some caution you know reports in January claimed that Apple cut its iPhone 10 production citing slower than expected holiday claims on February 1st Apple revealed that continued to prove impr the holiday quarter Revenue year on year although iPhone sales dropped a little bit um I I think what we're seeing here is is just the kind of way the cycle is going to become that Apple's making a transition among devices adding to capabilities devices moving everyone off of home button moving everyone to face ID and uh at the same time sort of straddling this keeping older devices going keeping older devices well supported and and even in production you agre that kind of assessment yeah yeah I do you know we we see this where where apple is sort of straddling these two big things where Apple's making these these brand new devices uh and getting everything for the you know most of the US market and most of the World Market off of home buttons and onto face ID at the same time Apple just started mass production of the iPhone 6s in India the uh the iPhone 6s is for sale there alongside the iPhone SE and with opened up a facility there to manufacture it so that they can avoid import duties basically things that are made in country aren't subject to import duties so they bring a factory there and everyone's happy that there's now local employment there the uh the 6s and the 6s plus will be made there and um that's that's kind of interesting because the 6s is gosh a phone that was new when we started making this podcast a couple of years ago I mean it's been a while hasn't it it's been been quite a while but I mean at least we're still seeing Apple continue to support it I mean when iOS 12 launches this ball at least we're still going to see it running on a lot of those I mean it runs on everything that iOS 11 ran on so it's definitely interesting to see them really starting to try to support like those older handsets not only just keeping them around but like you said keeping them in production and continuing to pump out more of them yeah I I was really actually um excited about the concept that iOS 12 will keep these older with good performance I felt like they were both answering the question about is Apple trying to make my phone slow from the battery debacle and at the same time saying that you don't have to worry these phones aren't going away they're going to feel as good as they possibly can yeah I think it's it's definitely a a statement against Android phones that don't get those updates they're trying to push those updates you know for phones as old as they can when that 6s came out I mean we're several OS iterations later and it definitely looks embarrassing when you look at the competition's ability to upgrade their phones yeah well I mean that's two years on right there was the seven and the eight and and 10 at that point so it's it's a big deal and I've been struggling with this Android thing for a while now for example I have an exus 6p that stops at Android 8 it won't get Android 9 uh I'm I'm looking around here at Android TV stuff because people are trying to say Now's the Time to buy TVs you know the the World Cup is going going on and and so there's a lot of promos for that kind of thing and you see TV manufacturers are shipping televisions with Android 6 on them and and well Google's done a decent job of making it so that applications can run across different levels of the OS I just you know you shake your head and you wonder why because the um Android TV on boxes is now in beta for Android 8 it's getting Oreo a bunch of them skipped getting seven of course 8 has big improvements in terms of being able to separate out manufacturer customizations from the OS build so that it's easier to do updates in the future but only now we're getting eight for Android TVs as betas when they're issuing nine for the phones it's kind of Madness it really drove me crazy before I was on Verizon so I couldn't get like the original iPhones and I had uh a couple Droid handsets and it it drove me bonkers when like an a big update would come out that they'd announc a whole thing and then you know you don't get it you have to wait for you had to wait for Google to send it to the manufacturer to the carrier before they would issue it so I mean if you wanted any of those new features you really had to figure out a way to install it yourself um but it drove me crazy like I mean obviously I want to jump on the new stuff you know we're running the betas on our phone now and I always want those new things and for with Android even when they're publicly released it was impossible to get on my handsets and it was it was really frustrating yeah the only way to get a good Android update is to have a a pixel or or Nexus formerly yeah a Google phone buy a fresh phone yeah yep and and even then you're not guaranteed anything at all really you know the the Nexus 6p is 2 years old I believe maybe three at the most and and I've got eight on it and can't go to nine when Apple is sitting here supporting phones much older yeah it it seems like a problem but what do you do well what you do is if you're Apple you go ahead and figure out how to get foxcon and widraw to open up factories around the world where you want them right so they've got the widraw factory in India that we just mentioned and foxcon is opening up a big display Factory in Wisconsin now the the interesting thing that's been in the news this week has been that the foxcon factory is not really a sweet deal for the taxpayers there and basically the the thing is this is A10 billion Factory and the state and Municipal sweeteners they kicked in a billion dollars in benefits above an existing incentive package that they said was worth three billion so that's 4 billion they're in for and the state is responsible for covering 40% of the public bonds used to finance all the local expenses in the event that the project Falls over and it's it's just it looks like you know that foxcon got a really sweet deal out of this because the locals pledged a bunch the state pledged a bunch and what's foxc con's exposure here you know it feels like they've managed to lessen their risk and put a lot of it on the state which is an interesting position would you agree I I agree I mean they definitely were able to really lower their liability but I mean in the kind of the current US political climate there's a a lot of interest in that us manufacturing so they kind of had you know a lot of Leverage there like oh we'll do it but you really got to want it so they had to cough out a lot of stuff to make it happen and I'm sure Wisconsin wanted to be the one that got a huge manufacturing facility I mean they they really wanted it they had to put a lot down to get that to happen and and they got a lot of good press out of it but yet it doesn't seem like quite the deal that people were thinking that it was yeah so 30% of foxcon total investment in the plant 1.5 billion in state income tax credits for the jobs created 1.35 billion in credits for capital investment 150 million in sales tax exemptions on construction materials no corporate taxes on profits from sales on products made here so it's it's going to cost the state about 200 million a year and in addition to that another 764 million in incentives approved by Mount Pleasant and racing County 134 million for the Improvement of State highways and local roads near the site so it's going to take what 15 to 50 years to pay off via personal income taxes on people working there it's it's um you know it's one of these things where without getting too far into politics it's always a debate about how much the states should sweeten the deal or counties and local governments should sweeten the deal for companies to lure them to come you know if if everybody does it then you have to do it to compete and that's you know why South Carolina has the BMW plant versus another state for example but if no one does it then States just that then then companies just go to whatever climate is most welcoming based on the the default playing field of course that's unrealistic because then all it takes is one state to break ranks and you end up where we are now yeah pretty much I know we saw that a ton with uh when Amazon's looking for their second facility just States bending over backwards renaming towns offering money like so many things trying to get them to come there and it's insane what they're doing just to to try to get them to move to a certain location it it really is and there are tons of KnockOn effects that people don't consider well uh in terms of now that you've made this big draw so your housing costs become more expensive in the area and in turn other costs become more expensive and so now the people that live there to begin with can no longer afford to live there it it sort of sets in motion things that change the whole landscape of a of a city the whole makeup of a city and and Seattle underwent that with Amazon and and before Amazon underwent that with Microsoft where it really changed in a big way the affordability of living in Seattle which changes the character of a place let's talk about headphones who who's your favorite headphone manufacturer oh gosh I don't even I don't even know if I have a favorite headphone manufacturer I've got a lot I I switch between them all the time there's right now I'm really liking the um the Libras hone zip track I think it's like the track Plus or something like that really yes right those are the earbuds yeah yeah with the Adaptive noise cancelling those are really cool so I've been really liking those um we've been playing around with a new master and dynamic mw50 plus that has the swapable ear cups yeah those are those are some really really nice headphones um I actually have sitting on here my my Marshall headphones which I they they sound really cool and they have a very distinct visual quality to them they look really retro and stuff so I I love my Marshall headphones I've got a lot of headphones going on here I hate headphones I do the the problem that I have with headphones is uh frequently the clamping force of the headband you know if I'm wearing it for more than 10 minutes and it starts to hurt on my head because the clamping force is too tight forget it I'm wearing some Bowers and& Wilkins uh P5 Series 2 right now and I had to put them over a wide stack of books to try and stretch the headband out enough that it was comfortable my favorite set are a pair of what's called electrostats and they're a sort of electrostatic module in combination with the neodymium module and they sound really good and they're so comfortable and but you know your favorite headphone company in mine beats was slapped with a lawsuit what was the lawsuit about well I believe it was another one of the you know who I guess he claimed to be a co-founder right of actual beats and was this before they they started working with monster originally before they kicked monster away to join Apple so beats started a long long long time ago right the idea initially was said to have started in the ear in the mid 2000s so this guy Steven Lamar says that and in his lawsuit he says that he had this idea for a headphone brand endorsed by celebrities and he brought it to Dre and and Jimmy ien in 2006 and beats founding was influenced by Apple even before it bought beats in 2014 Robert Brunner the former Apple director of industrial design joined the firm pentagram was involved in the initial talks as was Apple retail VP Jerry McDougall uh beats ultim like ultimately like to distribute his headphones through monster instead of Apple at that time and the partners had a falling out they reached settlement under which yven and Dre would retain ownership of the brand named Beats by Dre and get 20% % royalty on gross sales Lamar and J would seed intellectual property rights for a 5% royalty rate and an equity interest in beats that was due them for contributions to the business model product Concepts brand Ed unded iconic designs things like that and the lawsuit was just about how much Dre and and uh even owned in royalties including profits gleaned from the $3 billion acquisition sale in 2014 so he was seeking more than 100 million bucks for his contributions and the defendants both of whom testified at the trial argued that he was only entitled to royalties from one headphone model the Beat Studio the first model the thing is when you go to court especially when you go in front of a jury you you leave yourself open to results that may happen differently than you think they'll go and so a jury found Lamar was entitled to 25,2 47,3 in royalties related to three models the studio 2 remastered the studio 2 Wireless and the studio 3 all of which are models that are of course based on the original studio so he he didn't get anything from like the solo or the Solo HD or or any of the other ones but for the studio for that first model the uh the overe ear set they went for all of them now in a related case Apple filed a countersuit against him also in 2014 for claiming co-founder status in order to launch his own headphone Brands during a period when new headphone Brands were launching on a regular basis that suit was actually dismissed in 2015 so it's it's interesting you don't always win on every suit but sometimes you win and you win reasonably big now this case is not the only case concerning beats and its Founders monster products their original manufacturing partner also sued beats into Apple in early 2015 and that suit is one that's still going on we haven't heard the last of it Monster is uh is no Le's Pro you know project it's his company and he he's done crazy things like he had a Super Bowl commercial you remember that one no I don't oh my gosh no he was in this year's Super Bowl in the commercials they ran monster ran a commercial and it was really a weird one because it it sort of it told the story through flashback of a a kid acting out no's life story acting out no Le's life story of of founding monster and and stuff like that and then the end shot was of no Lee himself the man actually driving the kid playing no Lee around uh as if he were his own chauffeur and and you know uh future self talking to past self saying you've come a long way kid or you've got a long way to go kid or something like that I can't remember it's been since January since I've thought about it but it was a really weird thing and uh and I met him at CES he's kind of an interesting dude he everywhere he goes is on a custom painted segue I mean so we were in a club and and no Lee who's a big dude rolls up on his segue with with hot rod Flames Point painted on the Segway fenders and that's that's the kind of guy that we're talking about here is an interesting dude and they launched a cryptocurrency called Monster money not too long ago and and so you know we're going to get into talking about monster cryptocurrency at some point here but not today today we're talking about the 25 mil that was awarded to this fell who brought the concept to Dre in 2006 what do you think about that stuff man I mean it seems like he definitely it it definitely got split in the middle I think I think that seems pretty fair considering what they were both asking for I mean you know Lamar is looking for a whole lot more out of that giant acquisition that he got in um but if they're going to buy that really the only thing that he came up with was the studio I think it's fair that he gets compensation for all of the the studio models and not all of the the huge line of beat stuff that's that's come since then yeah it makes sense and and especially since those Studio models have the same ID more or less they've those have pretty much remained unchange since other than you know few small changes but pretty much the same yeah now you mentioned your Marshall headphones a minute ago so so you've got a review coming up that we're going to publish eventually and by eventually I mean probably around Saturday or so of a marshall speaker yes tell me about this thing a little bit so I've got a couple of them here I've got the stanmore and the Acton and these are their Wireless multi-room versions so they've had their standard Bluetooth ones out for a while which I was definitely a fan of have a couple of them already and they came out with these Wireless versions late towards last year and they have AirPlay as well as chomecast and other stuff built in which is really nice but I was really interested in the way they did their multi-room things and what slightly frustrated me is they have not committed to Bringing AirPlay 2 they're kind of taking the approach of we have our own multi-room solution and it's better than airpl 2 because you don't have to use your phone to toggle between you know single and multi- room options and I think that's the wrong approach I think they 100% that okay so hold up CU I I have yet to experience these guys tell me what it is that they're doing to do multiroom because you mentioned that they've got chomecast built in and chomecast does multiroom MHM and you mentioned AirPlay and and airplay on its own AirPlay 1 is not exactly multiroom but never mind so how are they doing multiroom are they using the chomecast stuff that's built in to pull it off or are they doing their own flavor even though they've got Chromecast they've got a lot of of Google stuff in there I mean when you have to set these up originally you have to go through the Google home app so they could be using the chomecast to do it but I'm not certain they claim it's like their own way way of doing it but they have a physical button on the actual speakers that you can press to toggle between single and multi and whenever you put them into multi they just link up and they all start playing the same thing and it does work really really well it's kind of awesome I mean if you have a bunch of these around you just press the button or you can do it from your phone um in the Marshall multi room app you can toggle between single and multi for each individual speaker but you just hit the button on there so you don't even need your phone if you're playing something through one of them switch it to multi switch the rest to multi and they all start playing the same thing so in that regard it works really really well but what I was annoyed with was they seem to ignore the other benefits of AirPlay 2 they focus only on that multi- room option and act like that's the only thing that's going on and I think there's a lot more to airplay too so while their multi-room stuff does work well it works really well really simple to use setup very easy to understand I still wish they would put air 2 in there and right now they still just they keep putting it off saying our multiroom solution is better we're still thinking about airpl 2 okay so so what do you want them to do that AirPlay 2 does well there's a couple things that airpl airpl 2 does other than just multi room so one they have a bigger buffer in there which does take up more onboard memory but you're going to get a lot less drops in audio which still happens with AirPlay 1 and even with their current solution I definitely had a couple instances in their multi room setup where like like audio for literally just a split second though it would drop out from one of the speakers and then pick back up and it can be a little it doesn't happen often but it happened a few times during my testing in the last couple weeks just dropped out from one side and then pop back up and using a bigger buffer is going to stop that stuff from happening second of all especially for homekit users AirPlay 2 and homekit support those speakers will show up in the home app they can be assigned to different rooms and you can use Siri to control the playback so I can just ask Siri to play um my favorite Eagle songss in the living room and it can pop up on my living room speakers and start playing and I would love to be able to do that and not I mean I could do it from my homepod and send it to my other airpl 2 speakers which would be nice if it included the Marshall ones and those are not things that they can do with just AirPlay one all right so here's here's my request of you which is two two things one is if you had a chomecast audio device and they 30 bucks you you know could you put one of those in and use it with Marshall's multiroom stuff which would be interesting and indicative of whether or not they're using chomecast to pull it off and the second part would be you trying the Google assistant app to control the multi-room stuff because they obviously have chomecast built in and seeing how that goes and you can use the Google assistant app from your uh iPhone yeah and we're still finishing up the review um definitely still a lot more I haven't jumped into all of our audio tests that I want to run yet so we're definitely going to try track that down a little bit more and see if they are I have a few other multi-room speakers that claim to have that multi-room support um one's the lotson which is a new one coming from Urban ears so that does that pretty much uses the same exact thing um for their multi-room stuff so I'm going to definitely be testing out to see if that can interface with the Marshall ones um and if it does that's a a great benefit to their multi- room but it still doesn't solve the issues that we're seeing without airpl 2 yeah one of the other things that I do I'm audio testing is to put a microphone at a at a set distance from the speaker and to play back specific frequencies through the speaker and then see how those frequencies are detected with the mic to uh be able to to get a proper response curve you know to see what frequencies are actually playing and at what volume levels and and that gives me a feeling for how I feel about the speaker compared to other things that I've got yeah I've I had I've used their their acting their stand Moore um I can't remember what their little guy is um Stockwell maybe I've used them for a while and I I really do like the audio that comes out of them I think it sounds really nice and I really like their controls that you have it's not a ton of control you can control the treble and the base but I do like that you have some degree of variation there to really tune into your taste yeah and I got to say you know have you tried it next to a homepod cuz that's what our listeners question is going to be oh absolutely I definitely have I think the homep Pod is a little more bass heavy I mean that's the biggest one um and probably my biggest complaint about the homepod I hate the Bas on it which I know is going to be a divisive statement because a lot of people like it but I listen to a lot of podcasts um like this one and I watch a lot of uh TV through there and it is just way too messy um to work with TV just it's it's too too crazy doesn't work yeah well we will look for that review and I'm hoping every one of our listeners gets a chance to read it um I'm looking forward to hearing about it myself and tell me more about that multi room and try out the Google assistant and see if that's what they're doing because it's it's always interesting to know how they're pulling off that stunt absolutely absolutely in other court news because we were talking about courts a minute ago the Apple versus Samsung patent trial is finally and completely over I still don't believe it I don't I don't I no there's no way you can cry yourself to sleep at night you can rock yourself to sleep at night knowing that qualcom is still going on okay I feel a little bit better now another major long-going lawsuit is continuing okay good so both parties here Samsung and Apple agreed to settle any remaining claims and counter claims as a result the court denied Apple's motion for supplemental damages as well as pre- and post judgment interest according to documents filed through the US District Court for the Northern District of California Samsung for its part is giving up motions to invalidate Apple's 915 patent and seek alternative relief and toss a recent verdict so the exact terms of the deal have not been made public but after days of deliberating deliberating a federal jurly handed down its most recent decision regarding the Apple V Samsung case declaring the South Korean Tech Giant owes 533 mil 31666 for infringing on Apple's iPhone design patents another 5.3 million was awarded for two utility patents and Samsung lawyer John Quinn told judge Lucy Co that he had some issues with the verdict that would be addressed in post-trial motions based on these filings it appears that Quinn's concerns have been addressed or dismissed they've taken care of it this is over it's still hard to believe after all these years that it's actually over and it seems I'm I'm like emotionally invested in this trial at this point and it feels like almost like a for us onlookers it's almost like a unsatisfying outcome like I want to know like okay Apple lost Apple won um how much was owed by either party whatever it's going to be like that outcome and now we're left like almost like a cliffhanger like no we don't know how it ended I mean we sorted look Apple originally wanted a full $1 billion for the infringement and Samsung had previously advised it was willing to pay 28 mil and like happens in these kinds of things right that's somewhat of a negotiation you you throw out one number they throw out another number and you land somewhere in the middle and you know what you did get out of this was you got you know Adam Ball and Susan car um arguing about the merits of Apple's design patents you got people siding with Apple's legal team in viewing granted designs as applicable you you got a lot out of this and at the end of the day you don't have to know the exact numbers and you don't have to know that that Apple crushed their foes and you know defeated them victoriously in battle right you you don't have to have that kind of satisfaction because at the end of the day there's still actually business partners right Samsung is making displays Samsung wants to make the A113 chip they they have to work together despite this stuff so this was just business this was literally just about how much money was going to be paid and how much was going to happen so they didn't do it again kind of thing absolutely we I mean it's been it's been enjoyable to read about whether you side with apple or or Samsung you know I wasn't convinced that Apple really needed to win a billion dollars from that original settlement um but it definitely has given us a lot to read we've seen a lot of uh you know expert testimony from you know original designers and stuff come out it's been very interesting to to read and see over all of these years so I'm glad it's come to a close but it's a little bit Bittersweet you know if you if you want to be really unsatisfied if you want to be really dissatisfied the closing arguments are what you need to go over so Apple's lawyer Joe Mueller reiterated expert witness points saying the fact you can pull apart a phone means absolutely absolutely nothing the question is what did they apply those designs to it's not a paint of glass it's not a display screen that doesn't show a goey it's the phone by contrast Samsung's lawyer John Quinn said to the jury the apple design patents do not cover anything on the inside of the phones they don't even cover the entire outside under the law Apple's not entitled to profits of any article of manufacturer to which the design was not applied so their their closing arguments were still pretty much at loggerheads on this that they were able to agree and conclude this thing is probably very smart because they were paying tons in legal fees just keeping this thing going and you know judge Lucy CO's got to be tired of it too oh yeah I'm sure she is so you know she is forever going to be known as the judge for Apple at this point or the judge the judge on this case at this point so it's good to have moved on I think I I think it's definitely good now some some Joker wrote an article on our site some terrible guy I don't know about thirdparty remote platform support for Syrian iOS 12 and TV2 you you got anything to say about that rude person that that terrible reprobate of an individual um I do not have a single nice thing to say about him what about his article well who first of first of all let our listeners in on the Joe who is that guy okay that was me I definitely wrote that I wrote that earlier this week so thank you very much Victor um what what are you trying to teach us about here tell us tell us what's going on yeah so of all the things that kind of came out during the Keynote at Apple's Dev conference was this one kind of line just stuck with me and it was just uh federi mentioning that the remotes for the Apple TV that you they would now work with more thirdparty remotes and would even include series support and it was like oh that's pretty cool and I mean even since then we've learned that remotes are actually going to be a new category of homekit products which opens up even more possibilities but the the problem is at least right now we know know very little about what capabilities are going to be possible here and it really got me just started thinking of all the different ways that this could pan out um probably a lot more you know profound than they're actually going to be but Apple's released very little information about what we can expect here the only thing we really know is that many different companies like Savant and Creston and control 4 have all more or less signed on to support this and you'll be able to use their remote systems to control the Apple TV including using Siri so just using that as a base we can automatically know a few things such as now these third party remotes can control airpl 2 speakers and the homepod and all stuff like that and it just kind of can Branch out about what we can really expect here and I think it's going to be a lot more of a big deal than it kind of seemed during the keynote yeah so control 4 if if you have a control 4 system you've a spent a ton of money and but b a ton of money on license fees but control 4 lets you control pretty much everything in the house it acts as a home media server it acts as a receiver it can do all the home automation stuff and in the past if you had a control 4 and wanted to control an Apple TV you programmed the infrared remote codes into it so that it could go ahead and blast IR at your Apple TV or you you had it imitate the Apple TV remote through Bluetooth it was possible to go ahead and have it control an Apple TV in the past I think what's really new here is being able to control all the homekit devices and really be able to do series support so that through your Creston you can um you know use your Siri remote or or Siri from homepod and access your Crestron media library it it kind of goes both directions I think yeah I think it's going to be very interesting to see what we'll be able to do I mean obviously anyone who's you know followed the site in our YouTube channel for a while knows how much homekit stuff that I love to talk about and being able to either use these third party remotes I mean it doesn't have to be something as high-end as these as the control 4 and the cres and stuff it can be more consumer level like the like the Logitech Harmony we'd be able to hopefully see kind of integrate with this but so those things could control your homekit devices those could show up on your screen and control them just like on your iOS device but we also could see maybe like IR blasters working through homekit so if we had you know hopefully nice working versions of those compared to some of the really cheap ones but I can see you know Elgato coming out with an eve IR Blaster that could control your TV or a fan or an AC unit um anything that works through a remote and you could include those in scenes which could be a big deal because you could finally have your TV turn off with your good night scene so there's a lot of ways this could play out absolutely and and you know controlling home entertainment is one of those things people like to do as part of home automation being able to set the input on a receiver and turn on the video source and all these things is is obnoxious to do across four or five remotes and even HDMI C doesn't take care of it so Apple TV and homekit being able to control those things gets better you know it's one of the things that Neil Hughes has been doing using homebridge to talk to Harmony to try and pull that off over here I've been using Alexa with a Harmony remote lead setup to be able to do the same kind of thing seeing that finally talk to homekit properly would be a lot of fun yeah I would be really excited um I know in my home bridge tinkering that was one of the big things that a lot of people did was set up IR blasters or add the harmony control they're clearly wanted by people and I guess my biggest concern right now before I get ahead of myself with all these lofly expectations is when we're actually going to see anything I mean when we saw Apple ad Sprinklers and water control valves to iOS 11 that didn't ship until I think iOS uh 112 or 113 earlier this year so that was super delayed and then you also have the just the time to market for an average homekit accessory it can take easily a year before they get everything figured out um also I did this piece earlier this week on changes to home kit in iOS 12 and one of those things is they actually have a wholly new revamped dev kit for those mfi Partners that's supposed to drastically cut down those cycle times so they say you can get a prototype going within maybe a week and release time can be you can have a functional you know product to Market in maybe three months compared to the year or more that it's been taking now so I'm hoping one that Apple actually includes this in iOS 12 and then two we actually see products hit the market quicker rather than a year and a half from when Apple actually announces it right and that dev kit was that talking about the software authentication as well yeah basically just what they're using to yeah to set all that stuff up a lot more work is done through that dev kit than it was in the past and I think it just does a lot more of those homekit layers um hopefully cutting down the development time on new homekit products nice very nice cool well I think we are pretty much out of time that sounds good I've talked about all I want to talk about have you talked about anything you want to talk about no I think I'm good I mean I'm working on those I get those reviews to to finish up so everyone can check uh the written review as well as the video review uh this weekend fantastic well that's all we got going on here um Andrew thank you so much for joining us yeah of course no problem anytime where can people find you on the internet well they can follow me at Andrew U over on Twitter or obviously on the Apple Insider YouTube channel and uh the website and I'm at V marks on Twitter I encourage people to go ahead and email us at newsapple insider.com we are happy to take questions we love when you leave us reviews and we love when you ask us questions we will be back next week with more on the Apple Insider podcast nyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor and joining me is Andrew O'Hara what's going on Victor well I am once again recording from the bunker underneath the Apple Insider headquarters uh Far East Edition and I really appreciate you being available to join me here yeah of course no problem now I should mention if you love music and you love comedy you love Weird Al Yankovic would you agree with that statement I I think that's a pretty fair statement and if you've ever seen Weird Al play Live you know that he puts on an incredible show so he just wrapped up his ridiculously self-indulgent ill-advised vanity tour where for the first time he played his original songs he he you know this he's he's apparently not performed those in concert before he performed dare to be stupid buy me a condo and and more and there were 77 performances on this tour and every show was unique with a different set list they were all professionally mixed and mastered and they have Al's impromptu song stage banter with Stitcher premium not only do you get weirdal ridiculously self-indulgent ill-advised vanity tour but you also get access to 21,000 hours of original content exclusive bonus episodes of your favorite podcasts adree archives hundreds of standup comedy albums and more for a free month of Stitcher premium go to Stitcher premium.com weirdal and use the promo code Apple I don't know that's that's actually kind of interesting that's kind of we should totally do that yeah I think I mean we we should use that promo code I I think I I think I'm going to do that I'm going to put aside my work for the day and start listening to some of that absolutely but before we do that we need to talk about the news so ming quo who actually uh totally left where he formerly was employed I believe and is now out doing his own thing I'm not sure I have that entirely right but I know that he left where he was being an analyst before so he is back again with the new report and he's trying to answer investors questions about the 2018 product lineup That is the lineup that we're going to see for iPhones coming up this fall the previous reports are still the same but there are some new tidbits that we can get from this quo is expecting a new lower priced MacBook error which he'd mentioned before in March also still expected is an Apple Watch that's approxim the same size but with a larger screen so you know the the same physical size on the wrist but growing the border of the screen closer to the edge kind of thing and in his most recent note he also wrote about the 2018 phone lineup where the previous claims are still there but he expects that the Innovations in the space aren't clear to the supply chain until it's going to be very close to release and that kind of matches up with the reality we know right yeah I think all that sounds pretty believable there's nothing too outlanding is in in this report I mean supply chain people tend to get orders for parts and for them to piece together what the capabilities are or what the product is out of that is not always easy basically he uh he believes that Apple's growth is probably going to come from replacement demands in the high-end market and new users on the low end so that that we're going to see um the replacement for the iPhone 10 for example being a growth item slow growth is there We Believe apple is still the leading company in the Consumer Electronics sector and has surpassed its competitors by a wide margin in terms of innovative user experience and ecosystem development the leading advantages will benefit when innovating with new applications so the three models that are still speculated to arrive in the fall are two models with OLED screens that's a 6.5 in and a 5.8 in and a third that is an LCD screen at 6.1 in they all will probably have the true death camera array and use face ID but the LCD model will be singled out as a cost-effective model and one of the things that you know we've seen people talk about has been the concept of a phone without 3D touch I've been reading rumors about that kind of thing as well and we think that pegatron is identified as taking 60% of the LCD orders now back in January Tim Cook issued some caution you know reports in January claimed that Apple cut its iPhone 10 production citing slower than expected holiday claims on February 1st Apple revealed that continued to prove impr the holiday quarter Revenue year on year although iPhone sales dropped a little bit um I I think what we're seeing here is is just the kind of way the cycle is going to become that Apple's making a transition among devices adding to capabilities devices moving everyone off of home button moving everyone to face ID and uh at the same time sort of straddling this keeping older devices going keeping older devices well supported and and even in production you agre that kind of assessment yeah yeah I do you know we we see this where where apple is sort of straddling these two big things where Apple's making these these brand new devices uh and getting everything for the you know most of the US market and most of the World Market off of home buttons and onto face ID at the same time Apple just started mass production of the iPhone 6s in India the uh the iPhone 6s is for sale there alongside the iPhone SE and with opened up a facility there to manufacture it so that they can avoid import duties basically things that are made in country aren't subject to import duties so they bring a factory there and everyone's happy that there's now local employment there the uh the 6s and the 6s plus will be made there and um that's that's kind of interesting because the 6s is gosh a phone that was new when we started making this podcast a couple of years ago I mean it's been a while hasn't it it's been been quite a while but I mean at least we're still seeing Apple continue to support it I mean when iOS 12 launches this ball at least we're still going to see it running on a lot of those I mean it runs on everything that iOS 11 ran on so it's definitely interesting to see them really starting to try to support like those older handsets not only just keeping them around but like you said keeping them in production and continuing to pump out more of them yeah I I was really actually um excited about the concept that iOS 12 will keep these older with good performance I felt like they were both answering the question about is Apple trying to make my phone slow from the battery debacle and at the same time saying that you don't have to worry these phones aren't going away they're going to feel as good as they possibly can yeah I think it's it's definitely a a statement against Android phones that don't get those updates they're trying to push those updates you know for phones as old as they can when that 6s came out I mean we're several OS iterations later and it definitely looks embarrassing when you look at the competition's ability to upgrade their phones yeah well I mean that's two years on right there was the seven and the eight and and 10 at that point so it's it's a big deal and I've been struggling with this Android thing for a while now for example I have an exus 6p that stops at Android 8 it won't get Android 9 uh I'm I'm looking around here at Android TV stuff because people are trying to say Now's the Time to buy TVs you know the the World Cup is going going on and and so there's a lot of promos for that kind of thing and you see TV manufacturers are shipping televisions with Android 6 on them and and well Google's done a decent job of making it so that applications can run across different levels of the OS I just you know you shake your head and you wonder why because the um Android TV on boxes is now in beta for Android 8 it's getting Oreo a bunch of them skipped getting seven of course 8 has big improvements in terms of being able to separate out manufacturer customizations from the OS build so that it's easier to do updates in the future but only now we're getting eight for Android TVs as betas when they're issuing nine for the phones it's kind of Madness it really drove me crazy before I was on Verizon so I couldn't get like the original iPhones and I had uh a couple Droid handsets and it it drove me bonkers when like an a big update would come out that they'd announc a whole thing and then you know you don't get it you have to wait for you had to wait for Google to send it to the manufacturer to the carrier before they would issue it so I mean if you wanted any of those new features you really had to figure out a way to install it yourself um but it drove me crazy like I mean obviously I want to jump on the new stuff you know we're running the betas on our phone now and I always want those new things and for with Android even when they're publicly released it was impossible to get on my handsets and it was it was really frustrating yeah the only way to get a good Android update is to have a a pixel or or Nexus formerly yeah a Google phone buy a fresh phone yeah yep and and even then you're not guaranteed anything at all really you know the the Nexus 6p is 2 years old I believe maybe three at the most and and I've got eight on it and can't go to nine when Apple is sitting here supporting phones much older yeah it it seems like a problem but what do you do well what you do is if you're Apple you go ahead and figure out how to get foxcon and widraw to open up factories around the world where you want them right so they've got the widraw factory in India that we just mentioned and foxcon is opening up a big display Factory in Wisconsin now the the interesting thing that's been in the news this week has been that the foxcon factory is not really a sweet deal for the taxpayers there and basically the the thing is this is A10 billion Factory and the state and Municipal sweeteners they kicked in a billion dollars in benefits above an existing incentive package that they said was worth three billion so that's 4 billion they're in for and the state is responsible for covering 40% of the public bonds used to finance all the local expenses in the event that the project Falls over and it's it's just it looks like you know that foxcon got a really sweet deal out of this because the locals pledged a bunch the state pledged a bunch and what's foxc con's exposure here you know it feels like they've managed to lessen their risk and put a lot of it on the state which is an interesting position would you agree I I agree I mean they definitely were able to really lower their liability but I mean in the kind of the current US political climate there's a a lot of interest in that us manufacturing so they kind of had you know a lot of Leverage there like oh we'll do it but you really got to want it so they had to cough out a lot of stuff to make it happen and I'm sure Wisconsin wanted to be the one that got a huge manufacturing facility I mean they they really wanted it they had to put a lot down to get that to happen and and they got a lot of good press out of it but yet it doesn't seem like quite the deal that people were thinking that it was yeah so 30% of foxcon total investment in the plant 1.5 billion in state income tax credits for the jobs created 1.35 billion in credits for capital investment 150 million in sales tax exemptions on construction materials no corporate taxes on profits from sales on products made here so it's it's going to cost the state about 200 million a year and in addition to that another 764 million in incentives approved by Mount Pleasant and racing County 134 million for the Improvement of State highways and local roads near the site so it's going to take what 15 to 50 years to pay off via personal income taxes on people working there it's it's um you know it's one of these things where without getting too far into politics it's always a debate about how much the states should sweeten the deal or counties and local governments should sweeten the deal for companies to lure them to come you know if if everybody does it then you have to do it to compete and that's you know why South Carolina has the BMW plant versus another state for example but if no one does it then States just that then then companies just go to whatever climate is most welcoming based on the the default playing field of course that's unrealistic because then all it takes is one state to break ranks and you end up where we are now yeah pretty much I know we saw that a ton with uh when Amazon's looking for their second facility just States bending over backwards renaming towns offering money like so many things trying to get them to come there and it's insane what they're doing just to to try to get them to move to a certain location it it really is and there are tons of KnockOn effects that people don't consider well uh in terms of now that you've made this big draw so your housing costs become more expensive in the area and in turn other costs become more expensive and so now the people that live there to begin with can no longer afford to live there it it sort of sets in motion things that change the whole landscape of a of a city the whole makeup of a city and and Seattle underwent that with Amazon and and before Amazon underwent that with Microsoft where it really changed in a big way the affordability of living in Seattle which changes the character of a place let's talk about headphones who who's your favorite headphone manufacturer oh gosh I don't even I don't even know if I have a favorite headphone manufacturer I've got a lot I I switch between them all the time there's right now I'm really liking the um the Libras hone zip track I think it's like the track Plus or something like that really yes right those are the earbuds yeah yeah with the Adaptive noise cancelling those are really cool so I've been really liking those um we've been playing around with a new master and dynamic mw50 plus that has the swapable ear cups yeah those are those are some really really nice headphones um I actually have sitting on here my my Marshall headphones which I they they sound really cool and they have a very distinct visual quality to them they look really retro and stuff so I I love my Marshall headphones I've got a lot of headphones going on here I hate headphones I do the the problem that I have with headphones is uh frequently the clamping force of the headband you know if I'm wearing it for more than 10 minutes and it starts to hurt on my head because the clamping force is too tight forget it I'm wearing some Bowers and& Wilkins uh P5 Series 2 right now and I had to put them over a wide stack of books to try and stretch the headband out enough that it was comfortable my favorite set are a pair of what's called electrostats and they're a sort of electrostatic module in combination with the neodymium module and they sound really good and they're so comfortable and but you know your favorite headphone company in mine beats was slapped with a lawsuit what was the lawsuit about well I believe it was another one of the you know who I guess he claimed to be a co-founder right of actual beats and was this before they they started working with monster originally before they kicked monster away to join Apple so beats started a long long long time ago right the idea initially was said to have started in the ear in the mid 2000s so this guy Steven Lamar says that and in his lawsuit he says that he had this idea for a headphone brand endorsed by celebrities and he brought it to Dre and and Jimmy ien in 2006 and beats founding was influenced by Apple even before it bought beats in 2014 Robert Brunner the former Apple director of industrial design joined the firm pentagram was involved in the initial talks as was Apple retail VP Jerry McDougall uh beats ultim like ultimately like to distribute his headphones through monster instead of Apple at that time and the partners had a falling out they reached settlement under which yven and Dre would retain ownership of the brand named Beats by Dre and get 20% % royalty on gross sales Lamar and J would seed intellectual property rights for a 5% royalty rate and an equity interest in beats that was due them for contributions to the business model product Concepts brand Ed unded iconic designs things like that and the lawsuit was just about how much Dre and and uh even owned in royalties including profits gleaned from the $3 billion acquisition sale in 2014 so he was seeking more than 100 million bucks for his contributions and the defendants both of whom testified at the trial argued that he was only entitled to royalties from one headphone model the Beat Studio the first model the thing is when you go to court especially when you go in front of a jury you you leave yourself open to results that may happen differently than you think they'll go and so a jury found Lamar was entitled to 25,2 47,3 in royalties related to three models the studio 2 remastered the studio 2 Wireless and the studio 3 all of which are models that are of course based on the original studio so he he didn't get anything from like the solo or the Solo HD or or any of the other ones but for the studio for that first model the uh the overe ear set they went for all of them now in a related case Apple filed a countersuit against him also in 2014 for claiming co-founder status in order to launch his own headphone Brands during a period when new headphone Brands were launching on a regular basis that suit was actually dismissed in 2015 so it's it's interesting you don't always win on every suit but sometimes you win and you win reasonably big now this case is not the only case concerning beats and its Founders monster products their original manufacturing partner also sued beats into Apple in early 2015 and that suit is one that's still going on we haven't heard the last of it Monster is uh is no Le's Pro you know project it's his company and he he's done crazy things like he had a Super Bowl commercial you remember that one no I don't oh my gosh no he was in this year's Super Bowl in the commercials they ran monster ran a commercial and it was really a weird one because it it sort of it told the story through flashback of a a kid acting out no's life story acting out no Le's life story of of founding monster and and stuff like that and then the end shot was of no Lee himself the man actually driving the kid playing no Lee around uh as if he were his own chauffeur and and you know uh future self talking to past self saying you've come a long way kid or you've got a long way to go kid or something like that I can't remember it's been since January since I've thought about it but it was a really weird thing and uh and I met him at CES he's kind of an interesting dude he everywhere he goes is on a custom painted segue I mean so we were in a club and and no Lee who's a big dude rolls up on his segue with with hot rod Flames Point painted on the Segway fenders and that's that's the kind of guy that we're talking about here is an interesting dude and they launched a cryptocurrency called Monster money not too long ago and and so you know we're going to get into talking about monster cryptocurrency at some point here but not today today we're talking about the 25 mil that was awarded to this fell who brought the concept to Dre in 2006 what do you think about that stuff man I mean it seems like he definitely it it definitely got split in the middle I think I think that seems pretty fair considering what they were both asking for I mean you know Lamar is looking for a whole lot more out of that giant acquisition that he got in um but if they're going to buy that really the only thing that he came up with was the studio I think it's fair that he gets compensation for all of the the studio models and not all of the the huge line of beat stuff that's that's come since then yeah it makes sense and and especially since those Studio models have the same ID more or less they've those have pretty much remained unchange since other than you know few small changes but pretty much the same yeah now you mentioned your Marshall headphones a minute ago so so you've got a review coming up that we're going to publish eventually and by eventually I mean probably around Saturday or so of a marshall speaker yes tell me about this thing a little bit so I've got a couple of them here I've got the stanmore and the Acton and these are their Wireless multi-room versions so they've had their standard Bluetooth ones out for a while which I was definitely a fan of have a couple of them already and they came out with these Wireless versions late towards last year and they have AirPlay as well as chomecast and other stuff built in which is really nice but I was really interested in the way they did their multi-room things and what slightly frustrated me is they have not committed to Bringing AirPlay 2 they're kind of taking the approach of we have our own multi-room solution and it's better than airpl 2 because you don't have to use your phone to toggle between you know single and multi- room options and I think that's the wrong approach I think they 100% that okay so hold up CU I I have yet to experience these guys tell me what it is that they're doing to do multiroom because you mentioned that they've got chomecast built in and chomecast does multiroom MHM and you mentioned AirPlay and and airplay on its own AirPlay 1 is not exactly multiroom but never mind so how are they doing multiroom are they using the chomecast stuff that's built in to pull it off or are they doing their own flavor even though they've got Chromecast they've got a lot of of Google stuff in there I mean when you have to set these up originally you have to go through the Google home app so they could be using the chomecast to do it but I'm not certain they claim it's like their own way way of doing it but they have a physical button on the actual speakers that you can press to toggle between single and multi and whenever you put them into multi they just link up and they all start playing the same thing and it does work really really well it's kind of awesome I mean if you have a bunch of these around you just press the button or you can do it from your phone um in the Marshall multi room app you can toggle between single and multi for each individual speaker but you just hit the button on there so you don't even need your phone if you're playing something through one of them switch it to multi switch the rest to multi and they all start playing the same thing so in that regard it works really really well but what I was annoyed with was they seem to ignore the other benefits of AirPlay 2 they focus only on that multi- room option and act like that's the only thing that's going on and I think there's a lot more to airplay too so while their multi-room stuff does work well it works really well really simple to use setup very easy to understand I still wish they would put air 2 in there and right now they still just they keep putting it off saying our multiroom solution is better we're still thinking about airpl 2 okay so so what do you want them to do that AirPlay 2 does well there's a couple things that airpl airpl 2 does other than just multi room so one they have a bigger buffer in there which does take up more onboard memory but you're going to get a lot less drops in audio which still happens with AirPlay 1 and even with their current solution I definitely had a couple instances in their multi room setup where like like audio for literally just a split second though it would drop out from one of the speakers and then pick back up and it can be a little it doesn't happen often but it happened a few times during my testing in the last couple weeks just dropped out from one side and then pop back up and using a bigger buffer is going to stop that stuff from happening second of all especially for homekit users AirPlay 2 and homekit support those speakers will show up in the home app they can be assigned to different rooms and you can use Siri to control the playback so I can just ask Siri to play um my favorite Eagle songss in the living room and it can pop up on my living room speakers and start playing and I would love to be able to do that and not I mean I could do it from my homepod and send it to my other airpl 2 speakers which would be nice if it included the Marshall ones and those are not things that they can do with just AirPlay one all right so here's here's my request of you which is two two things one is if you had a chomecast audio device and they 30 bucks you you know could you put one of those in and use it with Marshall's multiroom stuff which would be interesting and indicative of whether or not they're using chomecast to pull it off and the second part would be you trying the Google assistant app to control the multi-room stuff because they obviously have chomecast built in and seeing how that goes and you can use the Google assistant app from your uh iPhone yeah and we're still finishing up the review um definitely still a lot more I haven't jumped into all of our audio tests that I want to run yet so we're definitely going to try track that down a little bit more and see if they are I have a few other multi-room speakers that claim to have that multi-room support um one's the lotson which is a new one coming from Urban ears so that does that pretty much uses the same exact thing um for their multi-room stuff so I'm going to definitely be testing out to see if that can interface with the Marshall ones um and if it does that's a a great benefit to their multi- room but it still doesn't solve the issues that we're seeing without airpl 2 yeah one of the other things that I do I'm audio testing is to put a microphone at a at a set distance from the speaker and to play back specific frequencies through the speaker and then see how those frequencies are detected with the mic to uh be able to to get a proper response curve you know to see what frequencies are actually playing and at what volume levels and and that gives me a feeling for how I feel about the speaker compared to other things that I've got yeah I've I had I've used their their acting their stand Moore um I can't remember what their little guy is um Stockwell maybe I've used them for a while and I I really do like the audio that comes out of them I think it sounds really nice and I really like their controls that you have it's not a ton of control you can control the treble and the base but I do like that you have some degree of variation there to really tune into your taste yeah and I got to say you know have you tried it next to a homepod cuz that's what our listeners question is going to be oh absolutely I definitely have I think the homep Pod is a little more bass heavy I mean that's the biggest one um and probably my biggest complaint about the homepod I hate the Bas on it which I know is going to be a divisive statement because a lot of people like it but I listen to a lot of podcasts um like this one and I watch a lot of uh TV through there and it is just way too messy um to work with TV just it's it's too too crazy doesn't work yeah well we will look for that review and I'm hoping every one of our listeners gets a chance to read it um I'm looking forward to hearing about it myself and tell me more about that multi room and try out the Google assistant and see if that's what they're doing because it's it's always interesting to know how they're pulling off that stunt absolutely absolutely in other court news because we were talking about courts a minute ago the Apple versus Samsung patent trial is finally and completely over I still don't believe it I don't I don't I no there's no way you can cry yourself to sleep at night you can rock yourself to sleep at night knowing that qualcom is still going on okay I feel a little bit better now another major long-going lawsuit is continuing okay good so both parties here Samsung and Apple agreed to settle any remaining claims and counter claims as a result the court denied Apple's motion for supplemental damages as well as pre- and post judgment interest according to documents filed through the US District Court for the Northern District of California Samsung for its part is giving up motions to invalidate Apple's 915 patent and seek alternative relief and toss a recent verdict so the exact terms of the deal have not been made public but after days of deliberating deliberating a federal jurly handed down its most recent decision regarding the Apple V Samsung case declaring the South Korean Tech Giant owes 533 mil 31666 for infringing on Apple's iPhone design patents another 5.3 million was awarded for two utility patents and Samsung lawyer John Quinn told judge Lucy Co that he had some issues with the verdict that would be addressed in post-trial motions based on these filings it appears that Quinn's concerns have been addressed or dismissed they've taken care of it this is over it's still hard to believe after all these years that it's actually over and it seems I'm I'm like emotionally invested in this trial at this point and it feels like almost like a for us onlookers it's almost like a unsatisfying outcome like I want to know like okay Apple lost Apple won um how much was owed by either party whatever it's going to be like that outcome and now we're left like almost like a cliffhanger like no we don't know how it ended I mean we sorted look Apple originally wanted a full $1 billion for the infringement and Samsung had previously advised it was willing to pay 28 mil and like happens in these kinds of things right that's somewhat of a negotiation you you throw out one number they throw out another number and you land somewhere in the middle and you know what you did get out of this was you got you know Adam Ball and Susan car um arguing about the merits of Apple's design patents you got people siding with Apple's legal team in viewing granted designs as applicable you you got a lot out of this and at the end of the day you don't have to know the exact numbers and you don't have to know that that Apple crushed their foes and you know defeated them victoriously in battle right you you don't have to have that kind of satisfaction because at the end of the day there's still actually business partners right Samsung is making displays Samsung wants to make the A113 chip they they have to work together despite this stuff so this was just business this was literally just about how much money was going to be paid and how much was going to happen so they didn't do it again kind of thing absolutely we I mean it's been it's been enjoyable to read about whether you side with apple or or Samsung you know I wasn't convinced that Apple really needed to win a billion dollars from that original settlement um but it definitely has given us a lot to read we've seen a lot of uh you know expert testimony from you know original designers and stuff come out it's been very interesting to to read and see over all of these years so I'm glad it's come to a close but it's a little bit Bittersweet you know if you if you want to be really unsatisfied if you want to be really dissatisfied the closing arguments are what you need to go over so Apple's lawyer Joe Mueller reiterated expert witness points saying the fact you can pull apart a phone means absolutely absolutely nothing the question is what did they apply those designs to it's not a paint of glass it's not a display screen that doesn't show a goey it's the phone by contrast Samsung's lawyer John Quinn said to the jury the apple design patents do not cover anything on the inside of the phones they don't even cover the entire outside under the law Apple's not entitled to profits of any article of manufacturer to which the design was not applied so their their closing arguments were still pretty much at loggerheads on this that they were able to agree and conclude this thing is probably very smart because they were paying tons in legal fees just keeping this thing going and you know judge Lucy CO's got to be tired of it too oh yeah I'm sure she is so you know she is forever going to be known as the judge for Apple at this point or the judge the judge on this case at this point so it's good to have moved on I think I I think it's definitely good now some some Joker wrote an article on our site some terrible guy I don't know about thirdparty remote platform support for Syrian iOS 12 and TV2 you you got anything to say about that rude person that that terrible reprobate of an individual um I do not have a single nice thing to say about him what about his article well who first of first of all let our listeners in on the Joe who is that guy okay that was me I definitely wrote that I wrote that earlier this week so thank you very much Victor um what what are you trying to teach us about here tell us tell us what's going on yeah so of all the things that kind of came out during the Keynote at Apple's Dev conference was this one kind of line just stuck with me and it was just uh federi mentioning that the remotes for the Apple TV that you they would now work with more thirdparty remotes and would even include series support and it was like oh that's pretty cool and I mean even since then we've learned that remotes are actually going to be a new category of homekit products which opens up even more possibilities but the the problem is at least right now we know know very little about what capabilities are going to be possible here and it really got me just started thinking of all the different ways that this could pan out um probably a lot more you know profound than they're actually going to be but Apple's released very little information about what we can expect here the only thing we really know is that many different companies like Savant and Creston and control 4 have all more or less signed on to support this and you'll be able to use their remote systems to control the Apple TV including using Siri so just using that as a base we can automatically know a few things such as now these third party remotes can control airpl 2 speakers and the homepod and all stuff like that and it just kind of can Branch out about what we can really expect here and I think it's going to be a lot more of a big deal than it kind of seemed during the keynote yeah so control 4 if if you have a control 4 system you've a spent a ton of money and but b a ton of money on license fees but control 4 lets you control pretty much everything in the house it acts as a home media server it acts as a receiver it can do all the home automation stuff and in the past if you had a control 4 and wanted to control an Apple TV you programmed the infrared remote codes into it so that it could go ahead and blast IR at your Apple TV or you you had it imitate the Apple TV remote through Bluetooth it was possible to go ahead and have it control an Apple TV in the past I think what's really new here is being able to control all the homekit devices and really be able to do series support so that through your Creston you can um you know use your Siri remote or or Siri from homepod and access your Crestron media library it it kind of goes both directions I think yeah I think it's going to be very interesting to see what we'll be able to do I mean obviously anyone who's you know followed the site in our YouTube channel for a while knows how much homekit stuff that I love to talk about and being able to either use these third party remotes I mean it doesn't have to be something as high-end as these as the control 4 and the cres and stuff it can be more consumer level like the like the Logitech Harmony we'd be able to hopefully see kind of integrate with this but so those things could control your homekit devices those could show up on your screen and control them just like on your iOS device but we also could see maybe like IR blasters working through homekit so if we had you know hopefully nice working versions of those compared to some of the really cheap ones but I can see you know Elgato coming out with an eve IR Blaster that could control your TV or a fan or an AC unit um anything that works through a remote and you could include those in scenes which could be a big deal because you could finally have your TV turn off with your good night scene so there's a lot of ways this could play out absolutely and and you know controlling home entertainment is one of those things people like to do as part of home automation being able to set the input on a receiver and turn on the video source and all these things is is obnoxious to do across four or five remotes and even HDMI C doesn't take care of it so Apple TV and homekit being able to control those things gets better you know it's one of the things that Neil Hughes has been doing using homebridge to talk to Harmony to try and pull that off over here I've been using Alexa with a Harmony remote lead setup to be able to do the same kind of thing seeing that finally talk to homekit properly would be a lot of fun yeah I would be really excited um I know in my home bridge tinkering that was one of the big things that a lot of people did was set up IR blasters or add the harmony control they're clearly wanted by people and I guess my biggest concern right now before I get ahead of myself with all these lofly expectations is when we're actually going to see anything I mean when we saw Apple ad Sprinklers and water control valves to iOS 11 that didn't ship until I think iOS uh 112 or 113 earlier this year so that was super delayed and then you also have the just the time to market for an average homekit accessory it can take easily a year before they get everything figured out um also I did this piece earlier this week on changes to home kit in iOS 12 and one of those things is they actually have a wholly new revamped dev kit for those mfi Partners that's supposed to drastically cut down those cycle times so they say you can get a prototype going within maybe a week and release time can be you can have a functional you know product to Market in maybe three months compared to the year or more that it's been taking now so I'm hoping one that Apple actually includes this in iOS 12 and then two we actually see products hit the market quicker rather than a year and a half from when Apple actually announces it right and that dev kit was that talking about the software authentication as well yeah basically just what they're using to yeah to set all that stuff up a lot more work is done through that dev kit than it was in the past and I think it just does a lot more of those homekit layers um hopefully cutting down the development time on new homekit products nice very nice cool well I think we are pretty much out of time that sounds good I've talked about all I want to talk about have you talked about anything you want to talk about no I think I'm good I mean I'm working on those I get those reviews to to finish up so everyone can check uh the written review as well as the video review uh this weekend fantastic well that's all we got going on here um Andrew thank you so much for joining us yeah of course no problem anytime where can people find you on the internet well they can follow me at Andrew U over on Twitter or obviously on the Apple Insider YouTube channel and uh the website and I'm at V marks on Twitter I encourage people to go ahead and email us at newsapple insider.com we are happy to take questions we love when you leave us reviews and we love when you ask us questions we will be back next week with more on the Apple Insider podcast n\n"