Apple's price hikes on its iPhone line have been depressing its sales. But they've had one beneficial effect for the company: A larger portion of customers are purchasing pricier phones.

More than seven out of every 10 iPhone purchasers in December paid at least $700 for their phones and nearly a quarter paid more than $1,000, UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri reported in a research note Monday, citing data from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP). Both figures were up considerably from December 2017.

"Apple continues to move customers up the price curve," Arcuri said.

The company saw gains in several different price ranges, according to the CIRP data. One big jump was in the $700 to $800 range. Some 37.5% of iPhone consumers last month paid in that range for their devices. In the same month a year earlier, just 12% did.

The other big jump was for phones that cost $1,001 or more. The proportion of purchasers that paid that much grew from 8% in December 2017 to 23% last month, according to the CIRP data.

Overall, about 71.5% of iPhone purchasers paid at least $700 for a phone in December, up from about 45% in the same month a year earlier. On average, iPhone customers paid about $814 per phone in the holiday quarter, up from about $796 in the same period a year earlier, Arcuri estimated.

Customers are paying up for extra storage and new models

A combination of factors helped boost sales of pricier devices.

A larger proportion of iPhone customers purchased the latest models, which are generally priced higher than older versions, in December than in the same month in 2017. Some 65% of purchasers bought and iPhone XS, XS Max, or XR last month. In December 2017, 61% of buyers purchased an iPhone X, 8, or 8 Plus, the new models then, according to the CIRP data.

"The mix of new [phones] is returning to historical levels after a dip last year when consumers saw greater value in the older models," he said.

More customers also paid extra for models with added storage. For example, less than half of iPhone XS purchasers last month got the base model. In December 2017, by contrast, nearly 60% of iPhone X buyers purchased the base model.

And then there are Apple's prices. Last year, the company pushed prices up to the $1,000 point with the iPhone X, and this year it went even higher.

Last year's lineup included the X, which started at $999, and the iPhone 8, the next priciest model, which had a base price of $699.

This year, in addition to the $999 iPhone XS, the company has the jumbo-sized iPhone XS Max, which starts $1,099. Its next priciest model is the iPhone XR, which starts at $749.

The higher prices have depressed sales

Of course, those increased prices have proven to be a double-edged sword. Demand for new iPhones has plunged overall. The company has repeatedly cut production of its latest smartphones, according to published reports, and earlier this month, it warned of worse-than-expected sales.

Many analysts don't believe the increased prices will make up for the depressed unit sales. Arcuri for one expects a sharp drop in Apple's iPhone revenue in its current fiscal year, and doesn't expect the company's sales to recover until the fall of next year at the earliest.

Read this: Don't expect Apple's iPhone sales to get better anytime soon, says analyst

Investors and customers will learn more about how Apple fared in December and its expectations for the rest of the year Tuesday, when it reports its holiday results.

The Chinese electronics giant Huawei offered bonuses to its employees for stealing confidential information from outside companies, according to an indictment of the company on fraud charges issued Monday by the US Department of Justice.

Emails obtained during the federal investigation allegedly show that the stealing of trade secrets was a concerted effort by one of the world's leading smartphone makers, Huawei, as employees were offered bonuses based on the value of the information they stole.

In December, Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou was arrested during a stopover in Canada on allegations of violating trade sanctions with Iran. Huawei has been at the center of growing trade tensions between the US and China, as US lawmakers worry that the company works with the government of China to undermine American business. Huawei has long denied such charges.

On Monday, the US Department of Justice named Huawei and Wanzhou as national security threats, and announced that it had indicted the company, the exec, and two affiliates with bank and wire fraud, and charged Huawei with crimes including theft of intellectual property.

Read more:US calls Huawei and CFO Meng Wanzhou national-security threats, indicts company and exec on fraud and IP theft charges

The indictment alleges in part that Huawei stole information pertaining to robotic technology used for testing smartphones from a T-Mobile facility in Washington.

According to the indictment, Huawei employees violated confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements with T-Mobile beginning in 2012 when its employees took photos, gathered measurements, and even stole a piece of T-Mobile's testing robot, dubbed "Tappy." The stolen information was sent back to Huawei by the employees through an encrypted email address, according to the indictment.

When T-Mobile originally discovered that its trade secrets were allegedly being compromised and raised concerns, Huawei claimed the employees involved in the theft were working as "rogue actors," the indictment alleges. Huawei has said that it settled its differences with T-Mobile in 2017.

Neither Huawei nor the US Department of Justice responded to Business Insider's request for comment on Monday night.

Men’s wellness startup Hims has launched a line of women’s health products called Hers

Julia Steyn, the head of General Motors' car-sharing service, will leave the company, Automotive News reported Monday.

GM did not immediately confirm or comment on the news.

Steyn, a GM vice president, is finalizing her separation terms, according to Automotive News.

The executive started at GM in 2012 after stints at Goldman Sachs and Alcoa. She later took over at Maven, which was founded in 2016 as a separate GM division, concentrating on urban transportation and ride-sharing.

Read more: How GM went from a government bailout and bankruptcy to being one of the world's best-run car companies a decade later

In 2018, Maven unveiled a service that enabled customers who own or lease GM vehicles to offer their cars for short-term rentals.

GM has been undergoing a modest management reorganization. The head of its Cadillac division, Johan De Nysschen, stepped down last year. Also in late 2018, former president Dan Ammann became CEO of GM's Cruise self-driving division. Vice president and product czar Mark Reuss then took over the president position.

CEO Mary Barra has been in the process of positioning GM for a future in which autonomous and electric vehicles will be a bigger business, and when customers may no longer fall into the traditional ownership model.

Dropbox announced Monday that it will acquire e-signature startup HelloSign for $230 million, in the $10 billion cloud storage company's largest acquisition to date.

This deal is expected to close during Q1 2019. HelloSign was founded in 2011 and had raised $16 million in funding.

"With over an exabyte of data on our platform, millions of people already use Dropbox as a place to collaborate on their most important content," Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston said in a statement. "We're thrilled to welcome HelloSign's talented team to Dropbox and add their capabilities to our product suite."

For some Wall Street analysts who watch Dropbox closely, this move was unsurprising — to them, it was an obvious move to counter DocuSign, the $8 billion leader in the e-signature space, even as Dropbox looks to deepen its product offerings for larger business customers.

In fact, Dropbox had recently sent a user survey that asked users if they would be interested in using a Dropbox E-Signature feature, said Piper Jaffray's Alex J. Zukin, Sr. in a note to clients. That survey even asked about other e-signature vendors, including HelloSign, and what processes the hypothetical new feature could replace, he wrote.

The two companies have been partners, with Dropbox users able to use DocuSign to e-sign the documents that they stored in the cloud. But DocuSign recently made an acquisition, in the form of SpringCM, which signals that the two companies may soon find themselves competing in the cloud storage market for businesses.

Christopher Eberle, senior equity analyst at Nomura, expects Dropbox and DocuSign to go their separate ways.

"Dropbox thought, DocuSign is competing against us," Eberle told Business Insider. "Are they a partner or competitor? They're making a decision that DocuSign is becoming more of a competitor by working in document management and content management. Dropbox decided, we're adding our own signature so we don't need them."

Still, Dropbox says that it's still friend, not foe, with both companies.

"DocuSign and Adobe are important partners of ours and have built businesses that serve some of the biggest companies in the world. That won't change," a Dropbox spokesperson told Business Insider, in part.

A punch back at DocuSign

Right now, the fast-growing DocuSign is considered the industry leader in the e-signature business, followed by Adobe Sign. With SpringCM in its toolbox, DocuSign could be looking to eat Dropbox's lunch.

However, with about 12 million paying customers, Dropbox has the advantage of having more scale than the relatively more niche SpringCM, which focused exclusively on helping customers manage business documents like contracts. Similarly, Adobe Sign benefits from its association with the Adobe empire, which encompasses many products.

To that end, it could be DocuSign's game to lose.

"The real question is, can DocuSign compete against Dropbox and Adobe?" Eberle said. "Dropbox was using DocuSign to sign the bottom of its documents. Now they integrate HelloSign, and they don't need DocuSign. That makes it a difficult competitive landscape for DocuSign."

Still, Dropbox has to prove that it knows what it's doing with HelloSign and its technology, warned Richard Davis, analyst with Cannacord Genuity, in a note to clients.

"What we don't know at this point is the breadth and roadmap for the firm's workflow and contract management tools, which, to that extent, could give the firm competitive differentiation," wrote Davis.

And ultimately, analysts don't seem terribly concerned about DocuSign's prospects.

"We believe DocuSign warrants a premium valuation due to its strong competitive position, attractive financial profile, and impressive leadership team," Patrick Walravens, director of technology research and senior analyst at JMP Securities, wrote in a note to clients.

Moving towards enterprise

All in all, analysts say, this acquisition makes sense for the company, and they are optimistic about it. Currently, HelloSign has over 80,000 customers, including Samsung, Lyft and Twitter. Walravens estimates in his note that HelloSign has an annual recurring revenue of $20-$30 million, and that it's growing at about 50% each year.

Ultimately, this is a sign that Dropbox is taking a page from Adobe's book, and trying to move upmarket with features that cater to larger enterprise customers— important as it move beyond just serving the consumer users that helped it make its name. In that vein, you can take it as a sign of things to come.

"If you look at the way they're positioning themselves, it provides more traction in the enterprise business space," Holly Muscolino, research vice president at IDC, told Business Insider. "Even though it's frequently a consumer doing the signing, there's very few cases where [consumers] would be distributing sign documents. It's definitely an enterprise capability."

Read more:$9.95 billion Dropbox beats Wall Street expectations, but analysts still aren't sure if it can crack the enterprise space

In general, the move seems to have been well recieved, with the company's stock closing up 1%, at $24.14 per share, at the closing bell.

"We are positive on the acquisition and believe that this is a natural adjacency for Dropbox given its ability to capture a greater portion of its customers' workflows with both document workflow as well as e-signature, and believe that it is a natural cross-sell," Piper Jaffray's note said.

Here's the full Dropbox statement on competing with DocuSign and Adobe:

"Dropbox is built on an open and vibrant ecosystem. We believe in, and are committed to giving our customers a best-in-class user experience no matter the tool they choose. Our partnerships play a key role in ensuring that. Both DocuSign and Adobe are important partners of ours and have built businesses that serve some of the biggest companies in the world. That won't change. Millions of businesses around the world still use legacy pen and paper to get their most important work done. There's a huge opportunity for us to work together and expand the market for document workflow software, getting it into the hands of more people and improving their productivity and efficiency."

Instagram went down for some users.

For a little while on Monday afternoon, the Facebook-owned photo-sharing app refused to refresh for at least some users, loaded only partially, or otherwise worked extremely slowly. There were also issues accessing its desktop website. Some users may still see lingering effects from this outage.

It's not clear exactly how many people were affected or what caused the outage.

"We're aware of an issue causing Instagram to be down for some users right now. We're working quickly to fix this," an Instagram spokesperson told Business Insider after the problems manifested.

Down Detector, a website that tracks outages of popular websites, reported a spike in users saying Instagram was down on Monday, with a particularly high number of outages reported on both coasts of the United States and in the UK. Others took to Twitter and other social-media platforms to vent.

These kinds of outages occur from time to time on big apps, and, while a nuisance, tend to be fixed within hours or less.

AT&T started laying off employees in "legacy parts of the business" on Monday, according to a person familiar with the matter.

AT&T declined to share official layoff figures or name the parts of the company impacted when contacted by Business Insider.

On TheLayoff.com, a website where employees post information about such notices, there were multiple references to staff cuts in AT&T Technology and Operations. Earlier in January, Motherboard reported that layoffs would be "significant," citing an internal document.

The cuts are consistent with staffing changes made in the past, according to a source familiar with the matter. There are some areas where demand for legacy services continues to decline, and the company must adjust workforce numbers, the source said.

"We are hiring to meet the needs of the growth areas of our business," a spokesperson for AT&T wrote in a statement to Business Insider. "In fact, we hired more than 20,000 new employees last year and more than 17,000 the year before. In cases where we do have to adjust our workforce, we take steps to lessen the effect on employees."

An annual report by the Communications Workers of America told a different story. Its analysis said AT&T eliminated 10,700 union jobs across its business in 2018.

If you have any thoughts or information on layoffs at AT&T, contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Apple hit a wall trying to sell iPhones in the holiday quarter last year. It may not get past that obstacle until late next year.

That's the assessment of Timothy Arcuri, a financial analyst who covers the electronics maker for UBS. Apple's iPhone sales problems have almost certainly carried over into the current quarter and likely will plague the company for the rest of its fiscal year, which ends in September, Arcuri said in a research note on Monday. He doesn't expect the company's smartphone sales to rebound until it introduces its 2020 models in the fall of next year — and even that outlook is uncertain.

Apple CEO Tim Cook announced earlier this month the company saw disappointing sales in the fourth quarter last year and blamed depressed demand in China for the results. The Chinese economy has been slowing, and Cook said trade tensions also weighed on Apple's sales there.

"We believe the challenges in China would likely to continue and while a trade settlement could help, the damage in terms of iPhone is likely done," Arcuri said.

Arcuri is particularly pessimistic about Apple's iPhone sales

Apple likely sold 64 million iPhones in the holiday quarter, and will likely sell 41.5 million in the first quarter, he estimated. For all of Apple's fiscal 2019, it will likely sell 180 million iPhones, he said.

All of those estimates are below Wall Street's consensus forecasts. On average, analysts predict Apple sold 68 million iPhones in the fourth quarter last year, and will sell 45 million in the first quarter, and 195 million for its full fiscal year.

By contrast, Apple sold 77 million iPhones in the holiday quarter of 2017, 52 million in the first quarter last year, and 218 million for its fiscal year that ended last September.

Arcuri didn't offer an estimate for how many iPhones Apple will sell in 2020, but his revenue guidance for the year implies that he's forecasting continued depressed sales. He expects Apple to post $136 million in iPhone revenue in its 2019 fiscal year and $141 million in fiscal 2020. In fiscal 2018, Apple pulled in about $165 million in iPhone sales.

The company's surprise warning earlier this month has left analysts scrambling to adjust their iPhone sales estimates. Arcuri's projections are notably more pessimistic than those of TF International Securities' Ming-Chi Kuo. In his own note Monday, Kuo predicted Apple would sell 188 million to 192 million smartphones this fiscal year.

Last week, Intel gave a window into Apple's iPhone sales shortfall in the holiday quarter when it released its own earnings report for the period. The company said its cellular modem sales were $200 million less than it expected in the quarter. Given the price of the modems, that number implied that Apple could have sold 11.8 million fewer iPhones than expected in the period.

Read more: Intel just gave a revealing clue about how badly Apple's iPhone unit sales may have shrunk

Arcuri remains bullish on Apple

Apple has struggled since raising prices when it introduced its latest batch of phones last year. The company has reportedly had particular trouble selling its iPhone XR model, which was supposed to be more attractive to consumers because it costs less than its iPhone XS and XS max devices. Instead, Apple has repeatedly cut production on the model in the face of weak demand, according to multiple reports.

While Arcuri expects Apple's struggles to continue this year and next, he thinks its smartphone fortunes could turn around in the fall of next year. It could introduce then a model that has a foldable screen and the ability to connect to the wireless carriers' high-speed 5G — or fifth generation — networks.

"This is likely the next big phone cycle," he said. But, he continued, "there are still clearly ... many unknowns."

Despite his pessimism Apple's iPhone sales, Arcuri is bullish on the company's stock. Arcuri, who has a buy rating on Apple's shares and a $180 price target, thinks the company's fortunes and share price will be boosted by its emerging services business, which includes subscription businesses like iCloud and Apple Music.

Apple's shares closed Monday down $1.46, or 1%, to $156.30.

The fleets of rentable electric scooters that have expanded to wide swaths of the United States and other countries have largely missed out on a key market: New York City.

Lime, which has operated a pilot dockless bike share program here since 2018, is hoping that's about to change.

The $2 billion company opened up a storefront over the weekend to show off its newest model of scooter, the first to be designed in-house.

"This scooter is made for New York," according to Lime. Graham Rapier / Business Insider "This scooter is made for New York," Phil Jones, Lime's senior policy director for the east coast, said in an interview about the new scooter, which features larger wheels, mountain bike-esque shock absorbers, and a new braking system.

Not only is the heavier, more rugged scooter designed for New York's rough terrain, it should also last longer than its previous models, which can quickly wear out and are susceptible to vandalism.

Juicing — Lime's term for charging its scooters, which is done overnight by contractors — could be tricky in New York. The new model weighs about 40 pounds, and could be difficult to haul into a walk-up apartment for charging.

Winter has also taken its toll on Lime, which racked up its massive valuation and global expansion in much warmer months. The company packed up hundreds of scooters in cities like St. Louis and brought them south for the winter where they can actually be ridden.

Still, Lime is hoping New York could warm up the company's business in a big way. Already the largest market for ride-hailing, the city could soon legalize electric scooters (as well as medal assist e-bikes) and create a pilot program for companies like Lime, its larger competitor Bird, Lyft, and more.

Read more:E-scooters are sending dozens of people to emergency rooms — and the companies appear to have a double standard when it comes to safety

"We understand the issues New York City is facing with transportation equity," Jones, who previously worked for the city council and public advocate's office, said. "We want to be part of that solution by bringing real first-mile and last-mile solutions to all New Yorkers, especially in neighborhoods that are underserved."

Graham Rapier / Business Insider The midtown storefront is just blocks from Times Square and Madison Square Garden, and the nation's busiest rail station.

While Lime is recruiting riders with free coffee and a mural artist, Bird has been giving test rides along the Gowanus Canal to local news reporters. Both companies are betting these small shows, all legally required to be on private property, can set the wheels in motion once a pilot program launches.

Then there are the New York-specific issues. Unlike most of the rest of the country, New York's sidewalks are crowded — especially in Manhattan — and the bike lane network only exists on a tiny fraction of the massive street grid. What's more, the city's pavement is notoriously riddled with potholes and otherwise rough terrain.

"Here, it's clear that it will be pushed to where it's not happening in the middle of the street, but in bike lanes and on the sidewalk," Jones said. "We want to work with the city to make sure that comes across properly and that people understand how to use the scooters."

The US on Monday charged Chinese tech giant Huawei, its chief financial officer, and two affiliates with bank and wire fraud in a crackdown on the company, which is legally required to assist China's Communist Party at the government's request.

The Justice Department said Huawei sidestepped US sanctions on Iran by telling a global bank it had no relationship with Skycom, which the US said is controlled by Huawei. Skycom sold more than $100 million in banned technologies to Iran, the US said.

In another case, the Justice Department charged Huawei with wire fraud, stealing trade secrets, and obstructing justice, accusing the company of stealing robotics technology from carrier T-Mobile to test smartphones' durability.

Read more: China sentenced a Canadian man to death in the latest escalation of the countries' feud over Huawei

T-Mobile had accused Huawei of stealing the technology, called "Tappy," which mimicked human fingers and was used to test smartphones. Huawei has said that the two companies settled their disputes in 2017.

"Both sets of charges expose Huawei's brazen and persistent actions to exploit American companies and financial institutions and to threaten the free and fair global marketplace," FBI Director Christopher Wray said at a press briefing announcing the charges.

FBI Director Christopher Wray at the press conference. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

"As you can tell from the number and magnitude of the charges, Huawei and its senior executives repeatedly refused to respect US law and standard international business practices," he continued.

Wray said Huawei stole T-Mobile's technology to "circumvent hard-earned, time-consuming research and gain an unfair market advantage."

Wray's comments mirror the concerns of US businesses that operate in China and say the Chinese government forces technology transfer through a number of mechanisms.

Huawei has insisted it does not share data with the Chinese government and said it would refuse any requests from the government for data, but Chinese law demands all companies and citizens cooperate with the government when asked.

In an emailed statement to INSIDER, a Huawei representative said: "The Company denies that it or its subsidiary or affiliate have committed any of the asserted violations of US law set forth in each of the indictments, is not aware of any wrongdoing by Ms. Meng, and believes the US courts will ultimately reach the same conclusion."

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, responded to the indictment on Monday, saying "There is ample evidence to suggest that no major Chinese company is independent of the Chinese government and Communist Party - and Huawei, which China's government and military tout as a 'national champion,' is no exception."

"It has been clear for some time that Huawei poses a threat to our national security, and I applaud the Trump Administration for taking steps to finally hold the company accountable," Warner said.

John Hemmings, director of the Asia Studies Centre at the Henry Jackson Society told INSIDER: "The US is convinced that whoever dominates AI, Quantum computing, 5G, the internet of things, militarily and economically important technologies, will be like whoever has the jet engine, whoever has the dreadnoughts" Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou. Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press via AP

India accused Huawei of trying to hack into its telecom equipment in 2014, and the African Union accused Huawei of similar behavior in 2018.

Wray has previously said China is "not just a whole-of-government threat, but a whole-of-society threat," because of China's efforts to rival the US as a superpower and become the technological world leader.

China has accused the US of trumping up the charges against Huawei and its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, as part of a protectionist mindset looking to thwart China's rise.

Read more: Canada fired its Chinese ambassador after his 'mind-boggling' remarks on the arrest of Huawei's CFO

After Canada detained Meng pending the indictments, China detained two Canadian citizens in the country in a move that experts saw as transparent retribution.

Acting Attorney General Matthew Whittaker said while announcing the indictments that he was "deeply grateful to Canada" for detaining Meng so that she could be tried.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Fans have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of "Kingdom Hearts 3" since 2005, and with the game due out tomorrow, the internet is already rife with videos and details about the game's story. The game's ending however, remains largely unspoiled thanks to some unique efforts from the game's development team.

After leaked physical copies of "Kingdom Hearts 3" appeared online last month, "Kingdom Hearts 3" producer Tetsuya Nomura mentioned that the ending of the game was not actually on the disc. Nomura said the epilogue and secret movie at the end of "Kingdom Hearts 3" were "planned to be released at a later date," quelling concerns that the ending would be posted online ahead of the game's release date.

Instead, the ending will be added to the game as a part of a day-one patch. Once installed, the game will update to include the epilogue and players will be able to enjoy the full "Kingdom Hearts 3" experience from start to finish, complete with the ending. Our Xbox One review copy of "Kingdom Hearts 3" received a patch of 1.8 gigabytes (the game itself is a little less than 40GB).

Read more:'Kingdom Hearts 3' has leaked over a month early, and outraged fans are trying to punish the person they think did it

In the meantime, Nomura asked that fans refrain from sharing leaked footage of "Kingdom Hearts 3" online; millions of fans will get to dive into the game tomorrow and experience it for themselves.

The "Kingdom Hearts" series blends Disney's animated films and Square Enix's popular "Final Fantasy" series, featuring dozens of cameos from both franchises. Players visit worlds based on Disney movies such as "Frozen" and "Toy Story," fighting alongside Donald Duck, Goofy, and a host of Disney heroes. You can check out the launch trailer below:

Kingdom Hearts 3" will launch at midnight on Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Check back soon for our full review of this long-awaited game.

With the many excellent and affordable Wi-Fi router options available, there is no reason anyone should have to suffer through dead spots, outages, or several devices battling for bandwidth. Today's routers are designed to handle the loads of Information Age families. Below, we take a look at one of these: the Mercku M2 Wi-Fi router.

My first experiences with the Mercku router

Mercku

First of all, I was surprised that Mercku sent me three of the M2 Wi-Fi Routers to test in my 4,000-square-foot house. They sent me this rather than the M2 Hive System, which as of this writing doesn't appear to be available anymore. The Hive System features one M2 standalone router and four Bee Mesh Nodes that are small plug-in extenders. The Hive is designed to cover a home of 5,000 square feet. Fortunately, the standalone routers also work together to form a mesh system.

I asked Matthew Fleischl, a public relations representative for Mercku, what the difference is between the two mesh system options. He said multiple standalones are better for large, open spaces. But, the Hive System is ideal for homes or offices with many walls. I live in an eight-bedroom, three-story house, which would suggest the Hive would work better. But alas, I used the standalone routers, and they worked fine.

The M2 is a dual-band router capable of 867 Mbps speeds. There are three ports: LAN, WAN, and USB 2.0. Each router came in a red box with a power adapter, a network cable, and the setup guide, which guided me to connect the router to the modem, connect my phone to the router, and then use the app to do the rest. It took me about 10 minutes to connect the first M2. I had the whole mesh system up in about 25 minutes. This included updating the firmware, which I strongly recommend doing immediately. Otherwise, you will find the internet speeds are incredibly slow.

Read more: The best mesh Wi-Fi systems you can buy

How the Mercku Router performed

Mercku

A single Mercku M2 Router is supposed to be able to cover 3,000 square feet of space. I was not able to find information on how much added footage you get when you add multiple M2s. I installed the main router by the modem on the first floor. The other two routers were installed on opposite ends of the second floor. To test the coverage, I took my HP Spectre Folio Laptop and ran speed tests in various places around my house.

First, I tested right next to the modem and main router. The download speed was 59 Mbps, and the upload speed was 98 Mbps. These are not blazing-fast speeds, but they're enough for most purposes. Next, I went into our unfinished basement as far away from the main router as possible. I was impressed that I was still able to get some decent speeds: 43 Mbps download/28 Mbps upload. To really test the range, I went to my neighbor's house 100 feet away, and I was still getting passable speeds: 17 Mbps download and 11 Mbps upload.

Lastly, I tested the speeds in my second-floor office, where a secondary router was located. The laptop achieved 65 Mbps downloads and 83 Mbps uploads. I also tried speed tests with my HP Envy Curved All-in-One PC, which was connected to the router by an ethernet cord. I got my best speeds with this test: 194 Mbps downloads and 193 Mbps uploads. There were no dead spots in my house, and I was impressed that the coverage was good enough to stream video everywhere.

A router must be able to handle heavy bandwidth demands from several devices at once. To test this, I streamed videos or played video games on every device in my house simultaneously. This meant, seven devices were streaming video, and two were used for online gaming. Even with this heavy demand on the router, I didn't experience any degradation of video quality.

The Mercku app allows you to blacklist specific devices and websites, limit the download and upload rates of devices on your network, and block the internet at specific times. I tested all of these controls, and they seemed to work well for the most part. The only problem I had was blocking specific sites. For instance, I blocked Google easily. But, when I tried to blacklist YouTube, it took about an hour for the changes to take effect. And, I couldn't get it to block Facebook at all.

Read more: I tested the new smart home-friendly $300 TP-Link mesh Wi-Fi system — and now, my home is free of dead spots

Some concerns about the router

Mercku

The Mercku M2 seems fairly low-tech compared to the newer, fancier — and more expensive — routers coming out. It's only dual-band instead of tri-band, and it doesn't feature MU-MIMO (multi-user, multiple input, multiple output). Both of these features help with handling multiple users on the network at the same time. However, even without these features, we did not experience any issues when several devices were gaming and streaming videos.

Occasionally, we would just lose our internet connection. It was never at a crucial moment — like during a video conference — and would only be for a few seconds. But, it was annoying.

Lastly, the app doesn't automatically let you know when it's time to upgrade the firmware. Instead, you need to go into the settings and check for yourself.

The bottom line

Overall, the Mercku M2 works great for a mid-range router. I was surprised by how low the Wi-Fi speeds were in my tests since its actual performance was terrific. I was also impressed with how the mesh system of three routers was able to reach every corner of my house. And, it served several devices at once without any trouble. I would recommend the M2 to anyone who is tired of dead spots in their home or office.

Buy the Mercku M2 Standalone Wireless Wi-Fi Router on Amazon for $119

Electronic Arts, the company behind the mega-popular "Madden NFL 19" video game, has announced the results of its annual simulation of this Sunday's Super Bowl. It's a big deal: The "Madden" simulation has correctly guessed 10 out of the last 15 Super Bowl winners.

This time, "Madden NFL 19" predicts that the Los Angeles Rams will prevail over the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LIII this Sunday in Atlanta.

The Rams beat the Patriots 30 to 27 in the simulation, with Rams defensive end Aaron Donald earning the imaginary MVP honors with four sacks, a would-be Super Bowl record.

The results of the "Madden" simulation closely mirror the early betting odds for Super Bowl LIII. According to Oddshark, the Rams are the favorites over the Patriots by 2.5 points, and the over-under for the teams' combined score is 57.

Electronic Arts officially began simulating the Super Bowl with "Madden" in 2004 and the game has correctly predicted 10 of the 15 Super Bowl winners since. Last year, "Madden" predicted that the Patriots would win Super Bowl LII against the Philadelphia Eagles by a score of 24 to 20, but the Eagles ultimately won 41 to 33.

Super Bowl LIII will kick off Sunday, February 3rd at 6:30 on CBS. You can also watch it for free online.