Tech News and Commentary

Dave and the team discuss Apple's newest devices, the average time between phone upgrades, Elon Musk not regretting his tweet, Sam's club opening a cashierless store, Cortana's growth, iRobot's mapping data, and more.

 

Ed in Nashville, Tennessee listens on Supertalk WTN 99.7 FM and asked: "Will the iPhone SE continue to be compatible and usable in the coming years? Not the 8 or the X, but the SE; the simple one"

 

Ed, that’s hard to say. Apple is not longer selling the SE and whether or not it stays supported will likely hinge on how many users they can’t get to upgrade and how much money those users represent.

Realistically, the SE is a problem. The screen being so small is an issue for designing standard UI/UX, and Apple will have to spend money to keep it around and expect other developers to spend money to support it too.

What we know for sure is that’s supported in iOS 12, and discontinued from future sales. The end of life for the phone is not clear yet, but the 5S and SE are currently smallest supported phones, the 5S is the oldest too. Apple may decide not to update it to a new OS after the next release or the one after, and they may stop patching it altogether after that. Of course, that would be normal and expected given the age of the model by then, so you probably have a couple of years left of having security updates available for the phone. After that it may be smart to move on just because your own risk increases.

For now, it’s a supported phone, and so far we haven’t heard anything about that support coming to an end soon.

Doug in Stevensville, Michigan listens to the podcast and asked: "I was wondering if you know of an app that tells me where the cell phone towers are and perhaps what the signal strength of the cell phone towers are."

 

Doug, there aren’t many. There’s not much of a market for that kind of thing among general consumers.

OpenSignal may be your best bet. They provide detailed coverage maps by network sourced from from users who run the app and share the information. It will show you areas where your coverage will be strong and weak and give you some details that you may appreciate.

RootMetrics also offers apps that will show you real world coverage information that could help you pinpoint towers.

Cellmapper.net is not an app, but it may be the closest option to fitting your needs. It will map towers by network and give at least some detail about the tower’s frequencies.

You may be able to find more detail about the towers online in terms of power and frequencies, but not a lot of people are after the details, most of them want to know how many bars their phones are showing and that’s about it, so you won’t have a lot of consumer oriented apps and sources for that.

 

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