America is driving gun sales on the dark web

Sixty percent of all the weapons sold on the dark web are smuggled out of the US, according to research from the RAND Corporation. It, along with the University of Manchester, began investigating the illegal trade in firearms, explosives and ammunition available on Silk Road-esque marketplaces. The pair believe that sellers are making a killing by buying guns in the US and shipping them to Europe, where prices are higher.

Another revelation is that the weapons available are far newer, and are of a far higher quality, than would have been available on the analog black market. As New Scientist points out, “lax gun laws in the US are undermining stricter rules elsewhere,” especially in Europe. In addition to guns and ammunition, people can buy tutorials explaining how to make bombs or convert or reactivate replica and deactivated firearms.

Because of the levels of anonymity offered by these marketplaces, tracing the sales and destinations of the guns are very difficult. The concern, as with all weapon purchases, is that they’re falling into the hands of terrorists, gangs and lone-wolf shooters. The 2016 Munich shooter, for instance, appropriated the gear necessary to kill 10 and injure 36 people through the dark web.

The RAND Corporation itself isn’t the sort of hotbed of commie pinko liberalism that would decry gun policy on a whim, either. The body was set up by the defense industry and receives a large proportion of its cash from the armed forces and military contractors. It points out, however, that one or two weapons in the wrong people’s hands can cause “severe consequences.”

The study’s conclusions add that the current methods to track and trace arms trafficking would be effective if implemented properly. The only issue that can’t — yet — be combated is the supply, sale and creation of 3D-printed firearms that can be created at home.

As with all of these studies purporting to examine trade on the dark web, it’s important to look at the methodology used. After all, in the same way you’d not expect one person to represent a whole city’s views, it’s hard to know how detailed the analysis of a huge, theoretically unmeasurable network really is.

In this instance, researchers collected data between 19th – 25th September 2016, sucking down listings from 12 marketplaces. That created a total of 167,693 listings for products, of which 811 were judges as “relevant for the purpose of the study.”

Via: New Scientist

Source: RAND Corporation

Citymapper to launch a weekend night bus service in London

Citymapper’s brief bus experiment in London was more than a one-off. The company, which runs an independent transport and navigation app, is now planning a permanent bus route in the middle of East London. Like its two-day trial in May, the new service will utilise bright green buses equipped with USB ports for charging (a godsend when you’re traveling home at the end of a long day) and a big screen upfront for regularly updated route information. Unlike before, however, this service won’t be free; you’ll have to pay a small fee with a contactless card, Apple Pay or Android Pay.

Citymapper is making the leap from software to physical transport operator because of the data it’s slowly accrued from users in London. The new “CM2” bus route, which will launch in late August/early September and run every weekend (9pm to 5am), is a reaction to the insights it’s gleaned and the areas in London it thinks are currently underserved.

“But evaluating a route isn’t as simple as finding visible gaps,” the company explained in a Medium blog post. “In a multimodal city, users mix various modes together and have complex journeys. Hop-on, hop-off bus routes involve passengers boarding and alighting at different points.” In short, the route has to seamlessly connect with existing buses, trains and Tubes.

CityMapper has received the necessary licensing and approval from Transport for London to run the new route. Day-to-day operations will be handled in partnership with the Impact Group, a subsidiary of public bus operator Tower Transit. The vehicles will be tracked with tablets so that Citymapper can optimise its fleet and deliver real-time location information through its app. The company also has plans to track passengers anonymously, so other users know how many seats are available in the next bus. Otherwise, it should be a familiar experience; there will be bus stops, and a human driver to navigate London traffic.

It’s an experiment, but one that could have huge implications for how Citymapper operates. Like Foursquare, the company now owns a mountain of data that shows how people move around and live their daily lives. Citymapper could easily sell that information to governments and private transport companies, funnelling the profits back into its core business and app development. Or, it could expanded this new experiment and become a serious transport provider. With technology at its core, the company could be more nimble and efficient than traditional bus operators, tweaking routes and lowering fares to better serve passengers.

Source: Citymapper

Nintendo’s solution for online voice chat feels half-baked

From the moment you pick up a Nintendo Switch, it feels like a magical device. The company nailed the hybrid TV / portable concept and created a genuinely fun console that seemed to shed the awkwardness of the Wii U. Indeed, Nintendo has a habit for making fun consoles — but for the last three generations, it’s failed to build online communication options on par with Xbox Live or PlayStation Network.

Rather than baking voice chat into the Switch itself, Nintendo’s new console relegates the feature to a companion smartphone app. We just tried it out and it works, but it’s messy, confusing and completely unintuitive.

The idea behind the Nintendo Switch Online app isn’t a bad one — it’s designed so players can access game data, communicate with other players and organize online matches with friends even when they are away from their consoles. Each game will have its own in-app hub with a bevy of options. You can use the app to access SplatNet 2, for instance, to view your match history in Splatoon 2, check which multiplayer maps are in rotation, and even use in-game currency to buy new gear for your character.

Most of those features work perfectly well — seeing how much ink I’ve spilled in Splatoon 2 is neat, as is the ability to see how I performed in the last 50 matches — but the communication aspect is where the experience falls apart. Using the Nintendo Switch Online app to join a voice chat in Splatoon 2 is both physically and logistically complicated.

Here’s how it works right now: Players who want to voice chat with friends need to visit the Online Lounge menu of Splatoon 2’s multiplayer lobby and create a room. This opens a private match and sends a notification to the player’s smartphone — where they can then invite friends to join them through their friends list, a shortlist of other players they’ve encountered in other voice chat sessions who aren’t on their friends list or via a link sent out over social media.

Players invited to that voice chat room will see a notification on their Nintendo Switch — but they won’t be able to simply join it by opening the smartphone app alone. Instead, they have to open the app and join the private match through the Splatoon 2 Online Lounge menu. It doesn’t matter if you’re starting or joining voice chat through the Nintendo Switch Online app, you’re going to be juggling your smartphone and your console.

To make the cumbersome experience worse, hosting voice through the smartphone app separates the game’s audio from the chat audio — which potentially creates a situation where a player is wearing multiple pairs of headphones or choosing between hearing the game and hearing their teammates in voice chat. Nintendo and manufacturers like HORI are creating headset accessories that merge the two audio sources together, but that adds yet a third device into the Nintendo Switch-voice juggling act.

There are limitations, too. If users switch to a different smartphone app, they’ll be temporarily removed from voice chat — making it impossible to check text messages without removing yourself from the conversation. The app also requires the screen to stay on at all times, which takes a significant toll on the phone’s battery life. Finally, the chat ends as soon as your multiplayer sessions is over. If you want to use the Nintendo Online app for cross game chat with friends playing other Switch games, you’re out of luck.

At least once everything’s set up the experience works pretty well. While in the lobby in between rounds of Splatoon 2, all players can chat amongst themselves — but when a match starts, each team is automatically sorted into private chat rooms. The voice quality isn’t bad either and seems on par with Skype or other VOIP programs on a smartphone. Unfortunately, it offers few advantages over just using one of those services instead.

It’s early for Nintendo’s voice chat solution — the only game that supports it isn’t even out yet, and the service itself has only been live for a few hours — but at first blush, it’s not off to a great start. The act of juggling menus between two different devices is cumbersome and frustrating, and the entire process isn’t intuitive to new users at all.

Relegating the chat functions to a separate device is a strange decision, too. Competing services like Xbox Live and PlayStation solved the puzzle of online multiplayer voice chat years ago. Nintendo seems to be reinventing the wheel for no reason.

It’s worth noting, however, that the Nintendo’s Switch Online services are technically in beta and won’t have a full feature launch until early 2018. With any luck, the company will iron out the kinks by then. For now, however, Nintendo’s solution for online voice chat is cumbersome, unintuitive and weird. Unfortunately, that’s classic Nintendo.

You Can Now Pay For iTunes and App Store Purchases With Your Phone Bill in Three More Countries

Apple has expanded mobile phone billing to Denmark, Hong Kong, and Sweden, according to an updated support document on its website.

The feature is now supported by the carrier Three in each of the countries, in addition to SmarTone in Hong Kong and Telenor in Sweden.

The payment method enables customers to pay for iTunes Store content, App Store apps, iBooks, and Apple Music subscriptions without needing a debit or credit card, or even a bank account. Instead, purchases are added to a customer’s mobile phone bill and paid off at the end of the month.

Mobile phone billing is already available to customers of select carriers in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Norway, Russia, Singapore, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Apple’s support document explains how to set up mobile phone billing in the iTunes Store on both iPhone and iPad and Mac and PC.

Tags: Sweden, Hong Kong, Denmark, carrier billing
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Wi-Fi Mesh System Luma Launches $5/Month Service With VPN, Priority Tech Support, and More

Similar to devices like Eero and Google Wi-Fi, Luma is a Wi-Fi mesh system that launched in 2015, providing users with whole home Wi-Fi, parental controls, and network security scanning. Today, the company announced a new optional subscription model is coming to its mesh router, called “Luma Guardian,” and it introduces a privacy VPN, antivirus software, ISP speed monitoring, and priority tech support for $5 per month.

According to Luma CEO Paul Judge, who spoke with TechCrunch, the reason behind the subscription service is related to all of the security issues that Luma discovered within its customers’ networks over the years. Luma Guardian is a way for the company to dedicate time and resources to addressing those issues for the “thousands and thousands” of homes with its mesh Wi-Fi system.

It was also one of the earlier home networking devices to bake IoT security into its system, and as a result, the company spotted security problems in around two-thirds of the “thousands and thousands” of homes that currently sport a Luma.

“We’d been blocking them, and the next step was, how do we go to their devices and clean them up?” Judge tells TechCrunch. “How do we install antivirus and clean up the infections on those devices? For 15 years, we built networking and security equipment for companies. You can have the best equipment in the world, but at the end of the day, they had a team to manage it all. Having someone there who pays attention is key.”

Luma’s system already comes with a few security measures, including anti-malware, IoT cyber security, and new device alerts that block potentially untrustworthy devices from connecting to your personal Wi-Fi, and Luma Guardian expands upon those features. This includes a “Stealth Mode” that’s enabled through a virtual private network (VPN), allowing users to browse the web privately thanks to encrypted and anonymized web traffic sent between the Luma system, the cloud, and third-party websites.

Antivirus protection is allowed for up to three devices in the new subscription model, through a partnership with Webroot and its SecureAnywhere software, which performs regular scans of the devices to block viruses, malware, ransomware, and any suspicious files. Users will also be able to monitor the speed being granted to them by their internet service provider, with monthly reports in the iOS app to make sure they’re getting the speeds they pay for.

Also within the app, users can directly chat with Luma’s support staff for any tech-related questions they have about the router or its software. Luma Guardian subscribers also receive a priority support phone number so they can be moved to the front of the line when it comes to getting help from the company’s United States-based tech experts on the phone.

Luma owners can sign up for Luma Guardian through the Luma iOS app [Direct Link], and there’s a 30 day free trial offer for new subscribers. The Luma router itself is sold on the company’s website in a one pack ($149), a two pack ($249), and a three pack ($349). Luma describes the subscription service price as an “introductory” offer of $5/month for the first year, but the company didn’t detail how much it might increase by after that period.

Tags: wi-fi, Luma
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Best Buy’s ‘Black Friday in July’ Sale Includes Deals on iPad Pro, MacBook Air, and BeatsX

Best Buy today opened up its Black Friday in July sale for My Best Buy members only, with early access ending tonight at 11:59 p.m. CT. As usual, the sale includes a handful of Apple and Apple-related products with notable markdowns, like the 9.7-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro, iPad mini 4, MacBook Air, BeatsX, and more.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Best Buy and may earn commissions on purchases made through these links.

There are nearly two dozen 9.7-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro models discounted by up to $200 in Best Buy’s new sale, including 32GB, 128GB, and 256GB models in all colorways. The iPad mini 4 has only three models on sale, all covering the 128GB tier with savings of $125 on the small-screened iPad. Each iPad offer comes with a free six-month subscription to Kaspersky Internet Security for three devices.

Those looking for a 13-inch MacBook Air can choose from two models on sale, including the 128GB and 256GB flash storage tiers with savings of $300 and $350, respectively. Both MacBook Air models include a fifth-generation Intel Core i5 processor and 8GB of memory, as well as a free six-month subscription to Trend Micro Internet Security for three devices.

Best Buy is also running a separate Apple Sale Event that includes offers like up to $200 off an iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus with the purchase and activation of a monthly installment plan, $70 off the Apple Watch Series 2, and up to $400 off various iMac models. There’s also a markdown on the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, with savings of up to $350 depending on the specs and each user’s qualifications for a student discount.

For Beats products, shoppers can get the Powerbeats3 Wireless Earphones for $134.99 ($65 savings), Beats Solo3 Wireless Headphones for $219.99 ($80 savings), and BeatsX Earphones for $99.99 ($50 savings). iTunes gift cards have been marked down as well, including 10 percent off $100, $50, $30, and $25 cards.

Related Roundup: Apple Deals
Tag: Best Buy
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Bummed that Bitcoin doubled video card prices? Manufacturers are upset too

Gamers aren’t the only ones angered at the recent graphics card pricing explosion. For some graphics processor (GPU) makers, sales are sales, regardless of the source, but many manufacturers and system builders have told Digital Trends that they don’t like the boom in prices.

Although graphics card price tags always fluctuate around – and often above – their suggested retail price (MSRP), they’ve skyrocketed in the last few months, sometimes more than doubling. No, this wasn’t because a surge of new gamers began trying to render gorgeous high-end games. The culprit was a fresh batch of cryptocurrency miners. Riding the wave of record cryptocurrency highs, they descended on hapless retailers like a Mongol horde, buying up every energy efficient graphics card they could find.

It left supplies destitute, and like every case of an imbalance in supply and demand, prices rose. From a gamer’s perspective, this is a disaster. If stock cannot be found because this trend continues, how will anyone be able to upgrade their computers in the months to come when new games come out or heaven-forbid, their current graphics card dies?

Fortunately, gamers are not the only ones concerned by this trend, and a number of interested parties are aiming to turn things around.

A threat to PC gaming?

“Personally, I see this as a bad thing for the industry,” one graphics card manufacturer insider told Digital Trends. “These products were made for gaming, but now they’ll be used for something that the product wasn’t designed for – running 24-hours non-stop.”

Increases in component cost will always have a negative effect on business.

“It’s problematic for gamers, who now face poor availability and price hikes from retailers and resellers due to supply and demand.”

Ben Miles, managing director at British system builder Chillblast, told us that his company had faced price rises at the supply end, which meant rising prices for gamers.

“As you would expect, increases in component cost will always have a negative effect on business,” he said. “The shortages start at the cards that deliver the best bang for buck, then move onto the ones that delivers second best value, and so on, up and down the ‘cost vs compute’ bell curve.”

He went on to back up research we conducted into GPU pricing that showed mid-range cards, and those with a mix of energy efficiency and power, were the hardest hit. In other words, the most popular, affordable cards are selling out first. Some of the most powerful graphics cards may still be available, but not the ones a majority of gamers buy — a real problem.

Bill Roberson/Digital Trends

Soon, supply woes may extend far beyond mid-range cards.

“Right now, the worst affected cards are AMD Radeon RX 580, 480, 470 and 570. NVIDIA cards are now also extremely affected with the 1060, 1070, 1080, and even 1050Ti in severe constraint,” Miles said. “As these cards dry up, pressure starts to be put upon cards above and below the ‘ideal’ GPUs in the product hierarchy.”

Miles iterated in clear terms where Chillblast’s loyalty lies, describing the cryptocurrency market as a “persistent clinical threat” to the gaming industry.

There are always two sides to the story

Not everyone is as against the new trend in cryptomining purchases, though. British component seller Overclockers UK hopes to build a middle-ground industry that caters to both gamers and miners equally. Andrew Gibson, the company’s purchasing manager, described the problem the retailer hopes to solve.

“We’re happy to support the miners, but at the same time we’ve been taking care to support our gaming community too, so it is fair for everyone. We have graphics cards for gamers making sure that they are listed at just one per customer, and offered special deals for our dedicated forum members.”

One insider predicted that we’ll soon see the crypto-miner demand for cards dwindle.

In addition to supporting gamers, OCUK has tried to divert the miners toward cards better suited for them, rather than dam them off entirely. “We are the first to list mining edition graphics cards, and high wattage power supply combos that are suitable for mining,” Gibson said.

These tactics give hope that the hardware industry is on the side of gamers, and pushing towards a world where products designed for them are reserved for them — but, that’s not the case at every company.

“We see [cryptocurrency sales] as a good thing,” one insider from a major GPU manufacturer told us. “The gaming industry has been growing every year, and now with the whole mining boom.” Although the representative did suggest that “higher management is split” on the supply issues driving up pricing, for the most part, the company appeared to be pleased with the overall uptick in sales, despite the effect it was having on gamers.

A source within Sapphire had similar feelings, though they felt confident the company can support both gamers and miners in the near future.

“We have very healthy demand for all our products, and although the mining business is taking a lot of boards we have responded with the specific mining [cards] to ensure we support both our gamers and the crypto currency business.”

At worst, manufacturers see this as a temporary problem, with one anonymous insider predicting that we’ll soon see the crypto-miner demand for cards dwindle.

“As the currencies become more difficult to mine, we will see the hobbyists losing interest due to the cost and the mining ‘professionals’ becoming more prevalent. There is a delay in matching supply with demand, but we should see in the long-term miners buying the specific mining cards, and gaming products freeing up.”

Nvidia and AMD need to try and do something to protect core gaming values.

Perhaps that is the best future that gamers can hope for. If, in time, cryptocurrency mining becomes less profitable, miners may move on to fancier new hardware, or the industry will constrict until there are only a few huge farms making the bulk of the money from it.

There is some evidence suggesting this will happen sooner rather than later. Ethereum’s value has fallen steadily in recent weeks. Bitcoin, meanwhile, is dealing with the increasing difficulty of mining new Bitcoin, as well as the threat of a currency split.

The shortage (probably) won’t last forever

But what if the current supply issues aren’t dealt with in the coming months? As one source sources told us, the current mining boom has lasted much longer than the Bitcoin GPU mining bubble in 2014. It could crash at any time, but it hasn’t yet, and it’s not clear it will.

Ben Miles at Chillblast called on AMD and Nvidia to do more to combat the problems faced by cryptocurrency miners.

“Nvidia and AMD need to try and do something to protect core gaming values by making mining products available and priced less than gaming equivalents,” he said.

Additional stock and more affordable, mining-focused hardware seems like the best way to combat the problem, but it’s not something that’s going to happen overnight. We may be months away from the graphics card industry returning to some semblance of normality, and that could in turn cause issues for system sellers and even game developers, as their next game may not receive the love they expected from gamers unable to affordable a new video card.

For PC gamers, this is a potential doomsday scenario, and one with no immediate solution. Still, some comfort can be taken in the very stress the surge in cryptocurrency has caused. Companies want to sell cards to as many people as will buy them, both gamers and miners. That should spur them to increase orders and build even more mining-focused cards – or so we hope.

The British Museum publishes the first 3D scan of the Rosetta Stone online

Why it matters to you

For history buffs among us, the British Museum’s new release is like discovering a long-lost treasure.

You no longer have to visit the British Museum in London to see the Rosetta Stone in detail. Last week, the museum published the first 3D scan of the famous slab of hieroglyphics online at Sketchfab, where it’s accompanied by the website’s new sound support feature.

The Rosetta Stone is one the most important artifacts from ancient civilization but it wasn’t very important when it was first inscribed in 196 BC — one of many copies of a decree stating that a priest of a given temple supported King Ptolemy V for the sake of tax exemption. When these pagan temples were closed in the fifth century, knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphics was lost, until the stone was discovered in 1799 and the scripts were deciphered two decades later.

Although it was broken and incomplete, the Rosetta Stone became the key to understanding ancient Egypt. It features nearly identical texts in Demotic, ancient Greek, and Egyptian hieroglyphics, and scholars compared the texts to unravel the hieroglyphic alphabet.

Though discovered by Napoleon’s army, the Rosetta Stone eventually became property of the British after British troops defeated the French in Egypt in 1801. Still it was French scholar Jean-François Champollion who figured out that hieroglyphs recorded the sounds of the Egyptian language and thus opened the door for studying the language and culture more thoroughly. On September 27, 1822, over 20 years after the initial discovery of the Rosetta Stone, Champollion announced his discovery in a paper in Paris.

The Rosetta Stone arrived in England in February 1802 and was offered to the British Museum in July. At the time, the floors in the museum weren’t strong enough to support the weight of the slab, until additional funds helped build a new gallery strictly for artifacts acquired from the campaign.

“This scan was part of our larger attempt to capture as many of our iconic pieces from the collection — and indeed the unseen in store objects — and make them available for people to view in 3D or in more tactile forms,” Daniel Pett, a British Museum adviser who helped make the scan, told Digital Trends.

The stone isn’t the only object that the British Museum has scanned for the public. The Jericho skull (a plastered human skull that dates to between 7,000 and 6,000 BC), the Jennings Dog (a large Roman sculpture), and a series of Japanese netsuke figurines have also been scanned and uploaded online.

“We have around eight million objects, not all will be suitable for 3D scanning, but we have managed to capture over 200 so far,” Pett added. To view all of the British Museum’s scan, head over to their Sketchfab page and have a look around.

How to watch the British Open on your Android phone

The British Open starts today, and you can watch it right from your phone!

Golf fans everywhere already know what today is: the Open Championship, also known as the British Open, starts today. If you don’t want to miss a moment, or you want to rewatch the best moments, then you’ll need to know how to watch using your phone. While this is a bit tricky because of when most coverage is airing, you can take advantage of replays and clips from a few different apps to stay up to date.

We’ve got the details for you here!

• The Open
• NBC Sports
• Golf Channel Mobile

The Open

One of the best ways to keep up on everything going on during The British Open is the official Open app. You can watch the livestream, which is the ideal way to get a view of what is going on. You can watch a specific hole, or keep an eye on the featured group if you want to watch a specific player.

Of course, you can also listen to the radio broadcast, and watch highlights if you miss some of the action. The Open’s app also includes a Course Guide, and a leaderboard. You can also check out The Open online for all of the same features if you want to check things out on your laptop.

Download The Open (free)

NBC Sports

NBC Sports also has tons of coverage for the British Open. You can watch live coverage if you’re awake early, but you also get access to featured moments and clips throughout the weekend. This means that the most important moments that happen while you’re sleeping will be available by the time that you wake up.

From within the app, you can filter the content, as well as see what is coming up over the weekend. Especially handy for those who haven’t used the NBC Sports app before, there is a Golf Channel tab at the bottom of your screen. Tapping on that will directly bring you to all things British Open, which is exactly where you want to be.

You can also access of this through the website that has extras like more details on scores, and a better schedule. Of course, to access everything that NBC Sports has to offer, you will need to sign in with your cable provider.

Download NBC Sports (free)

Golf Channel Mobile

If all you’re really interested in is golf, then you’re going to want to take a look at Golf Channel Mobile. This is another app that you’ll need to sign in using your cable provider, but once you do that you’ll be good to go.

You can see scores, check the news, watch live videos, and even play some Fantasy Golf. This makes it a great way to keep up to date on things while the Open is going on!

Download Golf Channel Mobile (free)

Questions?

Do you still have questions about how to watch the British Open online? Is there another method that we missed here and ought to know about? Drop us a line in the comments below, and let us know all about it!

Galaxy Note Pro: Why Samsung should sell a $1500 phone

What happens when you unleash Samsung’s design, scale and dominance in the ultra high-end market?

In 2014, Samsung achieved something that few in the working tech media had the remaining capacity to feel: surprise. It did this at a relatively subtle launch event in New York City, inside the building that would become its flagship showcase, Samsung 837.

The product was the Galaxy Note Edge, which debuted alongside the company’s real fall flagship, the Note 4. The Note Edge was essentially a Note 4 with one side of its display a cascade of OLED and glass that, impossibly, met the metal bezel and disappeared. It was amazing and ridiculous and, unsurprisingly, not particularly useful. But it didn’t matter: people coveted this aspirational device, which was more expensive and harder to obtain than anything else from Samsung at the time. More importantly, the curved display technology that debuted in the Note Edge has since informed and, now, completely altered the trajectory of Samsung’s phone business. You can’t buy a Galaxy flagship without a curved OLED display.

The Galaxy Note Edge was an experiment that turned into a sea change for Samsung’s mobile future.

At the time, the Note Edge was little more than an experiment, a technology demo; the company didn’t market the phone much, largely because you couldn’t really do much with that edge screen, but also because the nascent manufacturing process was finicky, and production notoriously slow. It would take until 2015, with the much more mainstream (and symmetrical) Galaxy S6 edge before the kinks were worked out and curved screen phones could be built at scale.

I think about all this in the run-up to both the Galaxy Note 8 and iPhone 8 launch because recently there’s been a renewed focus on the aspirational high end of the market. The Galaxy Note 8 alone is expected to cost close to $1000 (though more reasonably closer to $900), while the iPhone 8, or iPhone Pro as some are calling it, could fetch up to $1500 in its most expensive configuration.

In a piece for iMore, Rene Ritchie makes the argument for why the iPhone 8 will cost so much:

iPhone 8 — or whatever Apple calls the higher-end model this year — is another attempt to fill a space, a more expensive and more premium one. Serendipitously, the relatively smaller size of the higher-end market also lets Apple embrace newer and more advanced technologies — the ones that are harder to scale — sooner.

That’s because Apple makes and sells millions of iPhones a year, and needs every version to be identical, even if it introduces some new technology from a partner like Samsung, or Broadcom, or Qualcomm, that’s difficult to manufacture at scale. The argument here is that if the iPhone 8 introduces something like behind-the-glass fingerprint sensing, inductive charging, or bezel-less OLED screens, it has to be able to procure enough components to satisfy the market, which last year was above 200 million units.

Apple and Samsung produce phones at scales that are not matched anywhere else in the mobile ecosystem, though OPPO and Vivo are quickly catching up.

But it will be incredibly difficult to outfit a phone with a handful of brand new (for Apple) and expensive hardware components that would be sold for $850 at a 35% margin. It’s just not going to happen. So, in order to meet that internal requirement for high margins and higher profits, Apple will be forced to price the iPhone 8 considerably higher than any model before it — perhaps even as high as $1500. It won’t be able to make many, so it will have to earn more from each one it sells. Make sense, right?

Well, let’s move that argument over to the Android space, and investigate the same potential move by Samsung. No other company in the Android ecosystem produces and sells as many phones as Samsung. No other company makes as much profit as Samsung. Practically no other company can match the scale required to build and sell hundreds of millions of phones every year (though one could argue that Huawei and LG could if the demand required it of them), nor does any other company, including Apple, control the production of as many of the components that go inside the phones as Samsung.

That’s why Samsung should build a Galaxy Note Pro.

A Galaxy Note Pro would do things my chimp brain can’t even dream up.

It took me a while to get here, mainly because setting the stage is important in an argument like this. The Galaxy Note series is already aspirational, and certainly the most expensive in Samsung’s lineup, but in recent years the line has converged, both aesthetically and technologically, with flagship Galaxys, to be separate in S Pen alone. Sure, the Galaxy Note 8 is expected to have a dual camera setup and more RAM, but from everything we’ve seen so far it looks to be both iterative and familiar.

A Galaxy Note Pro, however, would be expensive. It would include technologies that are hard to produce at scale, like an under-the-glass fingerprint sensor, impressive speakers, and a beautiful, energy-efficient (and VR-ready) 4K display. Its cameras would do more than just produce depth effects, but would use mirrors and prisms to extend focal length, or improve low-light capabilities, without increasing thickness. It may even fold. It would do things my chimp brain can’t even dream up.

Samsung is singularly capable in a sea of me-too and low-margin Android manufacturers of producing an honest-to-goodness $1500 phone that people would not only want to buy, but be able to buy. Other companies could surely piece together prototypes, and maybe produce a few thousand units — just look at RED’s new Hydrogen One phone for an example of such excess — but Samsung could easily produce a few million Galaxy Note Pro units without risking so much as a cautionary note on its quarterly earnings report. The Galaxy Note Pro would be the dream phone people could actually buy at Verizon, not some special edition Porsche Design Mate 9 that no one asked for.

On the marketing side, Samsung is the only company capable of producing in people a burning need to have this unattainable thing. In the first quarter of 2017, it sold 22.8% of all smartphones worldwide, a number slightly higher than its three major Android competitors — Huawei, Vivo, and OPPO — combined. It is on track to report its most profitable quarter ever, and continues to be, for many people not particularly well versed in the tech space, the only company selling Android phones; it’s not uncommon to meet people who identify Android as ‘Galaxy’. A Galaxy Note Pro would sit atop that success story.

Moreover, the Galaxy Note Pro would inform future phones in Samsung’s lineup, giving fans a realistic impression of what to expect in the following year, at a much more accessible price — and with all the kinks worked out.

(There’s a separate semantic argument to be made that the Note name, given the recent damage to its reputation and its meandering drift towards mainstream appeal in recent years, wouldn’t be appropriate for such a phone, and it should just be called the Galaxy Pro. Samsung does have a history of using the Pro moniker in its tablet, Chromebook and laptop lineup, so it would make sense to see it on the phone side, too.)

Many of the problems that Apple is addressing with the so-called iPhone 8 — edge to edge screens, retina unlock, wireless charging — Samsung solved years ago. A Galaxy Note Pro would be an opportunity to move back into a position of authority, to build on the years of experience it took to get from the Note Edge to the Galaxy S8. Those two phones don’t look anything alike, but that’s because it took Samsung half a decade to figure out exactly what people want. Now that it knows, it can continue to lead.