This video is relatively short (about 2 minutes) and the headline is from a quote right at the end, which doesn’t do the clip justice. This is Tim Cook talking about standing up for what is right, for who you are.

Watch it. Inspiring.

Apple:

Photographers from around the world are capturing stunning photographs on iPhone XS using Portrait mode, taking advantage of its new Depth Control feature that makes it possible to adjust the depth of field to create photos with a sophisticated bokeh effect. An update coming soon brings Depth Control to real-time preview, allowing photographers to change the amount of background blur before the shot is taken.

These images pulled from the #ShotoniPhone tag across social media highlight the enhanced Portrait mode on iPhone XS, showing advanced photography techniques that everyone can use.

Take a look at the photos. Gorgeous. To me, these are as good as any shots I could have shot with a film camera (I am an amateur, but still, great stuff).

I wish Apple would put together a page with lots of sample photos you could play with, sliding a depth slider, trying all the different lighting modes, just to get a sense of all the different possibilities.

Nice little article on making your web page dark mode friendly. I believe this tag only works with the latest Safari beta, but it won’t hurt to add the code to your pages now.

First things first, there were a number of articles about this, but most sourced this Mirror article, and the headline made me laugh.

On to the story, from the Mirror:

Russian president Vladimir Putin’s ‘goddaughter’ may have lost an incredible £1.25million after she was caught on camera using her iPhone.

Ksenia Sobchak, a journalist, politician and reality TV show host, is the face of rival smartphone manufacturer Samsung.

But the 36-year-old was caught on camera using her iPhone X – despite trying to hide it under a sheet of paper – during a television interview.

Apparently, Sobchak’s Samsung contract requires her to only use a Samsung device when in public. Ouch.

Thomas Brewster, Forbes:

Multiple sources familiar with the GrayKey tech tell Forbes the device can no longer break the passcodes of any iPhone running iOS 12 or above. On those devices, GrayKey can only do what’s called a “partial extraction,” sources from the forensic community said. That means police using the tool can only draw out unencrypted files and some metadata, such as file sizes and folder structures.

Previously, GrayKey used “brute forcing” techniques to guess passcodes and had found a way to get around Apple’s protections preventing such repeat guesses. But no more. And if it’s impossible for GrayKey, which counts an ex-Apple security engineer among its founders, it’s a safe assumption few can break iPhone passcodes.

This does sound promising, but I’ll take it with a grain of salt. Like jailbreaking a phone, this sort of thing is hard to quash completely. And certainly incredibly difficult to prove, one way or the other.

Hollywood Reporter:

Ed Catmull, who co-founded Pixar along with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter and in doing so revolutionized the animation industry, is retiring after a ground-breaking five-decade career, during which he has been involved with dozens of hit films from Toy Story to Frozen to this year’s Incredibles 2.

Catmull, who acts as president of both Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, will step down from his current roles at the end of this year, according to a Disney announcement on Tuesday, and then stay on as an adviser through July 2019 before formally retiring.

End of an era. If you are at all a fan of Pixar, I strongly suggest reading Catmull’s brilliant book, Creativity Inc.

Side note, Steve Jobs did invest a large chunk of change and became the majority shareholder, and John Lasseter came along later on. Check the Pixar Wikipedia page for the history details.

Austin Mann:

With the beautiful new LCD display, Smart HDR, and Single Lens Portrait Mode, there’s been a lot to test.

My main questions about iPhone XR: How are the portraits? How’s the screen? How’s the battery?

I hope you enjoy the adventure as I set out to find these answers.

As usual, Apple made sure Mann had an iPhone XR to review well before most others. And, unlike his iPhone XS review, I really liked many of the shots in this review. Lots of good tidbits from a photographer’s perspective.

MacRumors:

A collection of the logos that Apple sent out to members of the media for its October 30th event.

There are some very cool designs here. I hope we hear from Apple why they did it.

Fold n Fly:

A database of paper airplanes with easy to follow folding instructions.

I haven’t folded a paper airplane in 30+ years but now that I have a 12-year-old son, I know what we’re going to be doing this weekend.

Stu Maschwitz:

Steve Jobs famously described the computer as “a bicycle for our minds.” Whether or not you’ve heard that before, it’s worth refreshing your memory on the context by watching this short video. The gist is that humans aren’t very efficient at getting around when compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, but because we are “tool builders,” we can more than make up for it. The tools we create magnify our capabilities. They make us better versions of ourselves. And the computer, Jobs believed, is “the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with.” So what a bicycle can do for our bodies, a computer can do for our minds.

This is the opener of a terrific essay about Shortcuts, and the road that meandered to it.

If you have even the slightest interest in Shortcuts or inclination to tinker, put your feet up, grab a beverage, and savor this.

Scroll through Apple’s iPhone XR quote gallery. Can’t remember the last time an Apple product has been so positively received and recommended.

Take two minutes to watch Tim Cook speak. The content of his speech is strongly held, fervently delivered. I really got caught up in it.

Has he memorized this speech? I might just be missing it, but if he is reading from a teleprompter, he’s hiding it very well.

No matter, interesting to watch this political side of Tim Cook emerge, especially as compared with those early Apple rollouts, as he first dipped his toes in the keynote waters.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

According to The Information, Apple’s original content will be made available for free to Apple device owners, a rumor we heard earlier this month from CNBC.

While Apple’s content will be available at no cost, Apple will encourage users to sign up for television subscriptions from other cable networks such as HBO or STARZ.

And:

By making third-party content available via the streaming service and launching it in most countries around the world, Apple will be able to better compete with Amazon Prime Video and Netflix, both of which are available in 190+ countries.

What will the service be called? How will it be delivered? Looking forward to all the details rolling out.

But one point stands out to me: By rolling their own content and by limiting the possibility of any controversial content, Apple has no legal/political/licensing limitations on where they can roll out that content. Very smart.

Craig Silverman, BuzzFeed News:

Last April, Steven Schoen received an email from someone named Natalie Andrea who said she worked for a company called We Purchase Apps. She wanted to buy his Android app, Emoji Switcher. But right away, something seemed off.

“I did a little bit of digging because I was a little sketched out because I couldn’t really find even that the company existed,” Schoen told BuzzFeed News.

The We Purchase Apps website listed a location in New York, but the address appeared to be a residence. “And their phone number was British. It was just all over the place,” Schoen said.

It was all a bit weird, but nothing indicated he was about to see his app end up in the hands of an organization responsible for potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in ad fraud, and which has funneled money to a cabal of shell companies and people scattered across Israel, Serbia, Germany, Bulgaria, Malta, and elsewhere.

Oh, what a scheme. Incredibly sophisticated scam. Amazing story.

9to5Mac:

Today, Apple updated its T-shirt selection at the Visitor Center for fall with some designs that long-time fans might remember.

Eight designs are now available to purchase in either white or black for a grand total of sixteen shirts. Last fall’s set of clothing, first available at the iPhone X Special Event and later to the public in November, featured four designs in a range of colors for the same total of sixteen.

Held over from last year are shirts bearing a small rainbow Apple logo in the center and others emblazoned with Apple Park’s patent-pending ring logo, featured on invitations for September’s Special Event at Steve Jobs Theater. A monochromatic version of this design has been added as well.

I don’t know how I feel about Apple bringing back the old rainbow-coloured logo. Make no mistake, I had/have a lot of Apple logo gear including the sweatshirt pictured on the post’s page. But as much as I like the six-coloured logo, it feels like it belongs in the past.

The Verge:

Ever since the iPhone XS came out, there’s been criticism of its front camera — specifically, that it overly smooths skin. This, of course, was dubbed “Beautygate” in reference to Samsung-style beautification filters, which Apple has always insisted it doesn’t use.

Whatever the case, it was definitely there, but now it’s going away: during our iPhone XR review, Apple told me that iOS 12.1 will fix a bug in its smart HDR camera system that resulted in smoother-looking photos taken by the front camera on the iPhone XS and XR.

Essentially, Smart HDR was choosing the wrong base frame for HDR processing when you took a selfie.

Most of the blame for this issue centered on Apple doing something intentional or because of overly aggressive noise reduction. Turns out, it was just a bug.

Interesting Engadget piece on the iPhone XR: Half review, half interview with Phil Schiller, all of it a good read.

A few tidbits:

The iPhone XR might be the most interesting phone Apple has made in years.

Think about it: Apple just released its flagship XS and XS Max to a chorus of positive reviews, and now here it is, a month later, preparing to launch another smartphone that packs many of the same features found in those really expensive ones. For Apple, this is all a little unheard of.

Seems to me, this is the new normal, Apple easing into a new model for releasing and marketing iPhones. Having the same processor across the new product line has got to make life easier, production more cost effective.

“We had this technology we were working on for many years to be the future of the iPhone,” Schiller said of the X. “It was a huge ask of the engineering team to get it to market last year, and they did. … We knew that if we could bring that to market and it was successful very quickly after that, we needed to grow the line and make it available to more people.”

And:

“I think the only way to judge a display is to look at it,” he told me, adding that Apple calls these screens “retina displays” because your eye can’t discern individual pixels unless you press your face up right against the glass. “If you can’t see the pixels, at some point the numbers don’t mean anything. They’re fairly arbitrary.” And when asked if the screen was to blame for the XR’s staggered release, he simply said, “This is when it’s ready.”

It is interesting to see this lowest tier of the new product line be so highly recommended. Part of this is Apple’s proven genius with materials. Consider this quote from Ben Bajarin:

The Xr feels more premium than all its high-end Android competitors which bodes well for Apple.

No company has experimented more with material science/metals than Apple to get to where they are today.

Absolutely true.

A long, satisfying review. Lots to process, but a few things that stand out:

Only the iPhone XR offers a 128 GB storage tier, and it’s just $50 more. If you want more than 64 GB with an iPhone XS, you’ve got to pay $150 more than the base price and jump all the way to 256 GB. So in terms of what I would actually recommend for most people — getting the storage tier one level above entry level — the 128 GB iPhone XR costs $350 less than the 256 GB XS and $450 less than the XS Max.

People who are looking for some way that iPhone XR purchasers are getting screwed have it backwards. If anyone is getting screwed on pricing, it’s XS and XS Max purchasers, who don’t have the option of buying a 128 GB device for just $50 more than the baseline 64 GB models.

With anything beyond the free iCloud storage tier enabled, 128GB of storage should be more than enough. And, I’d argue, even 64GB should be enough as well, at least for most people. But for only $50, the leap to 128GB seems a no-brainer.

Another bit that stood out to me followed a series of images John took of his son. Take a look at the images, then read on:

In short, Portrait Mode is usable on the XR in some low light situations where it’s unusable on the XS.

Very interesting. I suspect this is something that could be addressed in a future software release. I can’t imagine the XS and XS Max can’t be tuned to solve this problem, but the proof is in the pudding.

Great read.

Apple has updated their repair pricing sheets to add the iPhone XR.

What I find most fascinating about this list is that pricing goes all the way back to the iPhone 3G. Take a look, and a walk down iPhone memory lane.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Alongside the iPhone XR, Apple today released a new 0.3m Magnetic Apple Watch Charger that’s equipped with a USB-C connector for the first time.

An odd product. Vastly more people have iOS gadgets than Macs, and therefore are set to charge with USB-A instead of USB-C.

Is this simply a niche product for the few who have built their charging lives around USB-C? As opposed to the Mac folks who (I’d wager) all have a USB-A dongle, just in case they need to charge their Apple Watch on their Mac.

Maybe it’s that simple, that this is just a product (after all this time) for folks who need a USB-C specific solution for charging their Apple Watch.

It’s the “after all this time” part that tickles my brain. Why now? Is there some function coming to Apple Watch that can only be delivered via USB-C? As opposed to via a USB-A adapter?

Is there still the chance of USB-C making an appearance on a non-Mac product?

This cable feels like a crossover product, spreading USB-C adoption beyond the Mac.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt, quoting a Piper Jaffray survey update:

Apple’s share of smartphone ownership was unchanged in the Piper Jaffray Taking Stock With Teens survey. Of ~8,500 respondents, 82% have an iPhone, the highest percentage we have seen in our survey. The iPhone may have room to move higher, however, with 86% of teens anticipating their next phone to be an iPhone, the highest ever recorded in our survey (up from 84% in Spring-18). Android was the runner up with 10%, down from 11% in the spring.

This is US teens, not world-wide ownership. But strong news for Apple, increasing their hold on the next generation of (well heeled?) phone buyers.

From Apple’s newly redesigned Jobs at Apple site:

We bring amazing people together to make amazing things happen.

We’re a diverse collective of thinkers and doers, continuously reimagining our products and practices to help people do what they love in new ways. That innovation is inspired by a shared commitment to great work — and to each other. Because learning from the people here means we’re learning from the best.

This is a love letter, calling to creative people who want a place to work that channels their best, gives them an opportunity to create innovative products.

The video embedded below does a nice job bringing this all home. Really well done. [Via MacRumors]

Scroll down towards the bottom of the article for a nice data table filled with all the specs for the three newest models, alongside the iPhone X. A terrific way to see what’s new and different for each model.

M.G. Siegler:

A month later, I think I’ve determined I actually prefer the ‘X’ — and now the ‘XS’ — size. This wasn’t the case when “downgrading” from a ‘Plus’ phone to the “regular” iPhone in generations past — I found the smaller versions to be almost comically small when switching between the two. With the ‘Max’ to the ‘X’ or ‘XS’, to be honest, I just like the latter form factor more — I find it to be a more natural size that feels better in the hand.

The comically small comment is interesting to me. I know a host of people who yearn for a new version of the SE form factor. There are people with small hands and/or terrific eyesight and/or small pockets that miss that size.

Same thing with Apple Watch. There are people with smaller wrists for whom even the old 38mm form factor was too large.

My instinct here is that the reason Apple won’t stay small is not strictly a market research response (i.e., customers don’t want small) but, instead, that Apple recognizes how hard it is to pack all the technology they have now and foresee in the future in a small package.

Add to that, a smaller package means smaller batteries, which doesn’t scale well, since the tech itself doesn’t shrink with a smaller enclosure.

Back to M.G.’s writeup:

Obviously, your mileage may vary, but I think part of my feeling is due to the fact that unlike when the ‘Plus’ models hit, it doesn’t seem like developers have really done anything to tailor their apps for the larger screen of the ‘Max’. Apple did, but not in the same way as they did with the ‘Plus’, where the entire OS changed in landscape mode, for example (it doesn’t here). And as a result, many apps just look sort of chunky now.

This is an important point. Every time Apple makes a sea change to the process of developing an app, legacy app developers have to make a choice. Do they spend time and money “fixing” their existing apps so they take advantage of the new form factor (adopt the new “safe zones” rules so the app plays well with the notch/bigger screens), or dedicate themselves to new app development and the lure of a brand new sales/money cycle?

All of that plus the fact that the bigger model doesn’t have the better camera system this time around (again, unlike the ‘Plus’ era), puts a lot of checks in the ‘XS’ box.

All three of the new models have the same processor, too. Interesting change of strategy for Apple. And a strong case for buying the iPhone XS.

There’s more to M.G.’s review, definitely a worthy read.

The New Yorker:

In early September, fifty-six nervous sommeliers in pressed suits and shined shoes assembled at the Four Seasons Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri. They were there to attempt the most difficult and prestigious test in their industry: the Master Sommelier Exam, a three-part, application-only ordeal that just two hundred and forty-nine individuals worldwide have passed—fewer than have travelled to space. The test includes a fifty-minute oral theory section, administered in advance, which ninety per cent of people fail; an elaborate assessment of service skills; and a famously challenging blind tasting. Some of this year’s sommeliers had been preparing for the Master exam for fifteen years; others were taking it for the sixth or eighth time. When the results were decided, the chairman of the Court of Master Sommeliers, the nonprofit organization that administers the Master exam, announced, over raised glasses of champagne, that a record twenty-four candidates had passed.

Then, five weeks later, on October 9th, the court made a scandalous revelation: it had been discovered that one of the test’s proctors, a Master Sommelier, had leaked “detailed information” about the blind tasting to an unknown number of examinees.

These kinds of insanely difficult tests, like this and “The Knowledge” for London taxi drivers, always fascinate me.

BuzzFeed News:

Apple CEO Tim Cook, in an interview with BuzzFeed News, went on the record for the first time to deny allegations that his company was the victim of a hardware-based attack carried out by the Chinese government. And, in an unprecedented move for the company, he called for a retraction of the story that made this claim.

Bloomberg’s response will likely only be “we stand behind our story” but it’s good to see Cook continuing to pressure them to put up or shut up.