I love to cook and especially love grilling. Over the years I’ve reviewed at least three meat thermometers that use an iPhone or iPad as a way to not only monitor the temperature of cooking meat, but to give you an indication of when it’s done. What makes the Meater Wireless Smart Thermometer (US$69) unique is that all of the electronics are in a small, nail-like probe that you insert into the meat — there are no cables leading to a external transmitter or your iOS device, so it’s truly wireless.
Design
Meater definitely gets the thumbs-up in terms of design. I frankly hated most of the other “wireless” meat thermometers that I reviewed, because the cables that dangled to the outside of the grill or oven tended to get damaged quite easily. Meater is tough — a stainless steel probe with no cables and a ceramic “handle” on one end. To charge Meater, you simply insert it into an attractive wood case that can be magnetically attached to the outside of your grill for safekeeping while cooking. That case hides a replaceable battery that charges the Meater when it’s not in use.
There’s another unique feature of Meater: it not only checks the temperature of the meat you’re cooking, but also lets you know if that cheap bimetallic thermometer built into your grill has been lying to you. It has an ambient temperature sensor, and I’ve found that my grill’s thermometer is as much as 110°F higher than the real temperature shown by Meater! That explains some of those situations where a salmon filet has spontaneously combusted…
There’s a line etched onto the exterior of the probe — that indicates the least distance into the meat you need to insert the Meater. That puts the ambient temperature sensor two inches away or less from the surface of the meat.
One other thing; the Meater uses Bluetooth for short range communications up to 10 meters (about 33 feet), but the website describes both Meater Wi-Fi and Meater Cloud as methods of increasing that range. This will apparently be built into the Meater Block, which includes four of the probes. There’s no word on whether or not an optional device for a single Meater will be available for Wi-Fi enabled cooking.
Function
As with other “Smart Thermometers”, Meater requires an app to monitor the temperature and tell you when the meat is cooked. The Meater Smart Meat Thermometer app is hands-down the best of its genre I’ve seen, complete with videos showing how to use the device, recipes for grilling, and so on.
About once a week I grill up a pair of 6 ounce salmon fillets, and up to this time I used a method that had varying results — six minutes of direct heat meat side down, followed by another six minutes of heat with the skin side down. Sometimes I shortened the second cooking time, but the salmon always came out well-done, which is the way my wife and I like it. However, I always felt that this also dried out the salmon fillets pretty badly, and on occasion a particularly fatty salmon filet would cause a flare-up that ended up turning the fillet into a piece of charcoal…
The salmon fillets were the perfect test subject for this review. I prepared them with a tiny bit of olive oil, salt and pepper, then inserted the Meater into one of the fillets. Note that the photo at the top of this section shows it inserted from the side — I changed that prior to cooking to inserting it straight into one end of the fillet so that the temperature sensor was in the thickest part of the meat as recommended.
Upon putting the Meater into the salmon, it showed an internal temperature of 49°F and an ambient temperature of 84°F. That ambient temp seemed high, but then I remembered that I had just thawed the meat in a microwave, so the Meater was probably picking up the skin heat. Next, I tapped the “Setup Cook” button and selected the type of meat (fish) and the exact type (Salmon). My grill was heated up by this point and I tossed the fillets on the grill skin down.
Today’s Apple World Today News Update podcast has news on where Apple’s future revenue growth will come from, a unique proof-of-concept app that wants to make it easier to assemble IKEA furniture, and a rumor about trial production of this year’s iPhones:
- Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty sees Apple’s future revenue growth coming not from iPhones, but from services and wearables
- A developer has created a proof-of-concept AR app that could make it easier to understand those sometimes nebulous IKEA furniture assembly instructions
- Rumors! Trial product of this year’s three iPhones could start as early as June
The text version of the podcast can be read below. To listen to the podcast here, click the play button on the player below. Apple News readers need to visit Apple World Today in order to listen to the podcast.
Text Version
This is Steve Sande for Apple World Today, and you’re listening to the AWT News Update podcast for Thursday, March 22, 2018.
Wall Street analysts are the next best thing to fortune tellers gazing into crystal balls to foretell the future, and they’re usually just as inaccurate. Morgan Stanley’s Katy Huberty is usually better than the rest, and today she said that she thinks that the future of Apple is shifting away from a reliance on the iPhone for revenues. What’s going to drive Apple’s financial fortunes? Monetizing its services, such as Apple TV, iCloud, iTunes, the App Store, and so on. Huberty estimates that about 60 percent of Apple’s revenue growth at the present time is attributable to services. The other big driver of revenues will be wearables like the Apple Watch and, although she doesn’t say anything about it, augmented reality eyewear. Huberty’s counting on many of Apple’s users — most of whom don’t subscribe to services at the present time — to start spending. Only about 18 percent of Apple’s total device installed base currently pay for services, so there’s a lot of room for growth. Average spending per device is about $30, with Huberty estimating that active users spend closer to $60/device and the potential for average spending to rise to over $100 per device. The biggest opportunities are in Apple Music, which only 2.9% of Apple users subscribe to, iCloud, and Apple Pay. Apple’s touchless pay system is currently in 50 percent of US retail facilities, and usage is low. If it catches on, which many analysts believe will happen, Apple Pay could be a huge addition to Apple’s bottom line.
Have you ever bought furniture from worldwide home accessories retailer IKEA, only to have hours of frustration assembling the furniture? IKEA’s instructions, which use diagrams and layouts without words to try to explain how to assemble tables, chairs, bookshelves and the like, have become a bit of a joke. There are even companies that have sprung up offering to assemble your newly purchased IKEA furniture for you…for a fee. Well, developer Adam Pickard has created a proof-of-concept augmented reality app called AssembleAR that shows how AR can innovate instruction manuals. Pickard designed AssembleAR to use the diagrams and layouts of the paper IKEA manuals, but adds animations and life-size references that help to simplify self-assembly. There’s no word on whether or not AssembleAR will ever become a real product, but it’s certainly captured the attention of more than a few people who have battled with IKEA furniture.
It’s only March, but expect the silly season of iPhone rumors to launch in earnest in the next few months. A report from the usually-inaccurate DigiTimes says that Apple will begin trial production of its 2018 iPhone lineup in the June timeframe, which could help the company work out issues with adding the TrueDepth camera used in FaceID to all of the new iPhones. Last year’s launch of the iPhone X was delayed to November after it was rumored that suppliers had problems making the dot projector that generates a face depth map work properly. Rumors have it that there will be three new iPhones this fall, all equipped with TrueDepth and FaceID. One will allegedly have a 5.8-inch OLED display like that on the iPhone X, another will supposedly go big with a 6.5-inch OLED display — kind of a super iPhone X — while a third will have a 6.1-inch LCD display to provide iPhone X-like capabilities in a much less expensive phone.
That’s all the news for today – join me tomorrow afternoon for another edition of the AWT News Update.
