Rene Ritchie does an excellent job digging through all the bits and pieces, pros and cons, that make up the new MacBook Pro. If you are considering a new machine, this is a worthwhile, detailed read.

What it’s like shopping for a new Mac at Best Buy. The slamming it down thing? Don’t try this at home.

Apple’s Q32018 earnings call is live at 2p PT / 5p ET this afternoon.

Here’s a link to listen in live.

Two reads that do a nice job setting expectations for the call:

• Mark Gurman, Bloomberg, with Apple Investors Seek Clues on Next iPhones With Results.

And:

• Mike Murphy, Quartz, with We’re about to find out just how good the iPhone X’s staying power is.

Uber will stop developing self-driving trucks that have been hauling cargo on U.S. highways, the ride-hailing company said on Monday, seeking to focus its autonomous-vehicle technology solely on cars.

This seems a little strange to me. Uber made a huge investment in self-driving trucks, and like the article says, this seems to be a logical extension of the work it has done over the years with cars. I bet we’ll hear more about this in the coming weeks.

The Daily Beast:

On August 3, 2001, a McDonald’s film crew arrived in the bustling beach town of Westerly, Rhode Island. They carried their cameras and a giant cashier’s check to a row of townhouses, and knocked on the door of Michael Hoover. The 56-year-old bachelor had called a McDonald’s hotline to say he’d won their Monopoly competition. Like winning the Powerball, the odds of Hoover’s win were 1 in 250 million.

Inside Hoover’s home, Amy Murray, a loyal McDonald’s spokesperson, encouraged him to tell the camera about the luckiest moment of his life. Nervously clutching his massive check, Hoover said he’d fallen asleep on the beach. When he bent over to wash off the sand, his People magazine fell into the sea. He bought another copy from a grocery store, he said, and inside was an advertising insert with the “Instant Win” game piece. The camera crew listened patiently to his rambling story, silently recognizing the inconsequential details found in stories told by liars. They suspected that Hoover was not a lucky winner, but part of a major criminal conspiracy to defraud the fast food chain of millions of dollars. The two men behind the camera were not from McDonald’s. They were undercover agents from the FBI.

This was a McSting.

This might just be the wildest story you read all weekend.

Vanity Fair: 1899, LeRoy, New York. My great-great-great-uncle, Orator Woodward, bent over a contract, signing his name to the purchase agreement for a new product: Jell-O. He paid $450, the modern day equivalent of $4,000, a sum that became one of the most profitable business deals in American history, responsible for the ubiquity of Jell-O, the super-wealth generations of my family would inherit, and the curse they came to believe accompanied it.

I had no idea about the Jell-O family curse, and it wasn’t until I explored beste Buchmacher ohne Wettlimit that I discovered there was an entire family behind the iconic brand. This revelation shed light on how deeply rooted family traditions can influence and shape the operations of well-known businesses. Understanding the family’s role provided a new perspective on the complexities and hidden histories that often lie beneath the surface of everyday products.

The Washington Post:

Shark Week, the Discovery Channel’s annual bonanza of shark documentaries, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this week. It’s the longest-running series on cable, and that longevity has given it a prime role in pop culture and public understanding of shark science. But its legacy is a mixed bag.

As a shark conservation biologist, I both love and hate Shark Week, but I watch every year. Other experts share my ambivalence. Here’s what some have to say about the series’ good, bad and sometimes ugly influence.

Like many people, I’m fascinated by sharks and when Shark Week first started, I watched it all of it. But now, not only has it become ridiculous, it’s actually often faked and contains a lot of bad science.

Here’s all of the Samsung anti-iPhone X ads from their YouTube channel. I think many of them are silly and childish. A couple make a good point or two but you really have to stretch to see them. Overall, pointless ads in my opinion.

Appleinsider:

Apple is pledging assistance to its Japanese customers affected by heavy rainfall in July, by announcing it will be providing repairs of iPhones, iPads, Macs, and other hardware directly damaged by the natural disaster at no charge.

Customers with damaged products can contact Apple on 0120-27753-5 before the end of September to arrange for a repair, an announcement on the regional Apple website found by Mac Otakara reveals. For the repair, products will be collected from the customers and serviced at no charge, in cases where a repair can be made.

Good news for Apple’s customers in Japan affected by the floods and landslides.

Above Avalon:

Apple has always publicly supported the iPad and Mac. However, that hasn’t prevented questions regarding Apple’s commitment to the two product categories from popping up. In recent months, Apple has shown a new level of openness when it comes to embracing both the iPad and Mac as unique and differentiated platforms for creative endeavors. The change is noteworthy when thinking about each category’s future.

Apple now finds itself with an iPad business that is twice the size of Mac in terms of unit sales, but smaller than the Mac when it comes to revenue. The iPad user base is nearly three time as large as the Mac user base and is growing by 20 million new users per year while the Mac user base is seeing more like 10 million new users per year. In a nutshell, both the iPad and Mac businesses have found stability and continue to connect with their respective user bases.

The differences/comparisons between the iPad and the Mac fascinate me. I get a lot of people asking for advice about “what should I buy?” and, for a lot of them, I can often recommend “just” the iPad.

Wired:

A car comes in, a 2015 Toyota Camry, let’s say, in Ruby Flare Pearl (that’s red) needing a bashed-in door Bondo’d and sanded. You just go to a shelf and take down 2015 Toyota Ruby Flare Pearl, click a canister into an airgun, and swoosh, you’re back on the road, right?

Nope. Car companies have put 50,000 to 60,000 car colors on the road, but even a big body shop like Alameda Collision Repair has just 70 or 80 colors on its shelves. Turns out Gonzalez isn’t just a fast painter, he’s a fast matcher. “I get the closest one,” he says, “and then I match the color.”

I knew the act of painting a car was difficult but I’d given no thought to how hard colour matching was.

Vox:

On Friday, July 27, the full moon will pass through the shadow of the Earth. For 103 minutes, the usually silvery moon will turn blood red and ochre. It will be the longest “blood moon” lunar eclipse of the century, lasting 26 minutes longer than the last total lunar eclipse, in January.

Here’s the good news: The vast majority of people on planet Earth will be able to see this lunar eclipse.

Here’s the less good news: Those of us in North America (save for a slice of Newfoundland, Canada) will not see it at all.

Sadly, by the time night falls in North America and the full moon rises here, the eclipse will already have ended. The moon will have finished traversing Earth’s shadow, or umbra. We’ll have to wait until January 21, 2019, when the next full lunar eclipse will be viewable here.

If you’re lucky enough to live within the viewing path of this eclipse, you should really get outside and enjoy it.

GlobeNewswire:

The festival, which will be held at Rice Eccles Stadium in Salt Lake City, is designed to ignite the vital conversation about what it means to unconditionally love, understand, accept, and support LGBTQ+ youth in our communities.

“Tim Cook joining us in Utah for LOVELOUD sends a clear message to LGBTQ youth that they have unlimited potential to achieve their dreams,” said founder and Imagine Dragons front-man Dan Reynolds about Tim’s presence at this year’s festival. “Tim is an unwavering advocate for human rights and equality, and we’re thrilled he’ll be joining our powerful line-up of speakers and performers.”

I’m glad Cook is doing this but I’m officially old. Except for Cook and Imagine Dragons, I don’t recognize a single other speaker or band.

Back in the day, when Silicon Valley was about silicon and technology, our industry elders used to wisely caution that Silicon Valley doesn’t invest in tobacco, alcohol, porn, and guns. Not anymore it seems. Thanks to an influx of new money and an increasingly porous definition of what is a Silicon Valley company, what was taboo once, is now a hot deal.

Om Malik has some tough words for everyone.

Ars Technica:

The chic, plant-based Impossible Burger that browns and “bleeds” like the real thing just got a little more possible.

On Monday July 23, the company behind the meatless meat, Impossible Foods, announced that the Food and Drug Administration had finally accepted its latest application to consider the burger’s key ingredient safe to eat. The final nod puts that ingredient—dubbed soy leghemoglobin—firmly in the regulatory category of “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS.

I’m a confirmed omnivore and I’d love to try one of these burgers.

Bloomberg:

With more than 1,000 big-box stores in North America and about 125,000 employees, Best Buy was supposed to have succumbed to the inevitable. “Everyone thought we were going to die,” says Hubert Joly.

Instead, Best Buy has become an improbable survivor led by an unlikely boss.

He had no retail experience—Best Buy’s stock fell 10 percent the day he was named CEO—but Joly understands how to value, and capture, customers’ time. Comparable sales rose 5.6 percent last year and 9 percent during the Christmas season, the biggest holiday gain since 2003. The stock price has quadrupled. Even Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is impressed. “The last five years, since Hubert came to Best Buy, have been remarkable,” he said at an appearance in April.

Not many people thought Best Buy could have pulled themselves out of the mess they were in ten years ago. They are not completely out of the woods but their success up to this point is remarkable.

Touch Arcade:

Tunity allows you to hear any TV, whether its muted or not, anywhere, just by letting the app scan the screen for a few seconds. Tunity feels like magic- Particularly when paired with AirPods, and you seriously just have to try it.

You open up the Tunity app, let it scan the TV you want to hear sound from, and if it’s a supported channel (most over the air and standard cable channels seem to be supported) the audio will just start playing on your phone. If it’s out of sync at all, you can fine tune the delay to make the audio 100% match up with the picture. It is borderline ridiculous how well this works.

I’ve used Tunity for years with varying levels of success. When it works, it’s really cool.

Petapixel:

Want to shoot some beautiful slow-motion footage of hummingbirds in flight? As this 4-minute video by photographer and conservationist Phil Torres shows, all you need these days is a smartphone.

Torres was recently in the Ecuadorian cloud forest shooting with his iPhone X and Moment’s lens attachments.

“I soon realized that the wide angle lens gives the iPhone and incredibly close focus point, allowing me to capture hard-to-pull-off wide-angle macro photos and videos,” Torres tells PetaPixel. “I set my iPhone to 240fps on 1080p (which my Canon 1DX Mark II can’t even handle), put on the wide angle lens, set it next to a hummingbird feeder in the cloud forests of Sumaco, and pressed record.”

Great. Now I have to go buy a Moments lens.

John Gabriel Adkins:

Myst should need no introduction. It’s a puzzle-heavy, non-violent graphic adventure with a slick visual style and the simplest interface known to humankind. You, the player, are a genderless, unnamed interloper on a surreal island, a world that seems almost to have emerged from a madman’s mind. Things get weirder from here: alternate dimensions; magical books with people trapped inside; and an increasingly sinister plot. This project proceeded to sell more than 6 million copies — the highest sales of any computer game until The Sims.

The ripples of Myst are visible even today, most obviously but far from exclusively within so-called “walking sims” like Firewatch: a focus on atmosphere, on a sense of being there, coupled with a seamless interface. Influence-finding, though, is not my main interest here. What follows is a history of this game’s histories. I want to analyze the dueling narratives that arose to contextualize and explain the single, seismic event that was Myst.

It’s hard to explain today what kind of an amazing revelation the original Myst was. I never finished the game but I loved playing it.

Sam William Smith:

The font picker is one of the most commonly used drop down menus in any creative application. Despite this, the default font picker on macOS has remained largely unchanged since the early days.

What I like about this relatively simple redesign is that it follows the pattern that Apple established in the Mac emoji picker, with sections for frequently used and favorited emoji/fonts.

I’d like to see this pattern become a standard throughout Apple’s design language. For starters, it’d be nice if the iOS emoji picker allowed you to favorite emoji, as you can in macOS.

Reddit user ltethe:

I’ve been a dedicated Mac guy for… I don’t know… Near 30 years? But lately I’ve pooh poohed some of the latest Mac features…

Haptic feedback, touch ID, Touch Bar…

It’ll take me a few years, but inevitably, I’ll get a new model Apple product, and the new tech is bundled in… And… Those features turn out to be waaaaaayyy cooler than I thought.

Interesting read, especially regarding Touch Bar. One of the things I love about Apple’s design sense is the thought that goes into each element. It’s delightful when a new feature shaves a bit of time off something I do on a regular basis.

For me, a perfect example of this is my Apple Watch unlocking my Mac. This sort of thing is Apple at their best.

Good little writeup. Heartfelt.

Juli Clover lays out the change from iOS 11 to iOS 12 that simplifies the process of closing out an app. On an iPhone X.

Good to know.

To me, just another sign of how splintered things have become. There’s iOS vs macOS, iPhone vs iPad, iPhone X gestures vs home button gestures, etc. Add to that the large set of features hidden behind 3D-touch. A lot to remember.

The Ringer:

Trailer Park was a buzzing hive of weird, funny, angry, often stoned people—most deeply talented—who banded together for about 20 hours a day to somehow perfectly encapsulate two-hour films into two minutes and 30 seconds (and then 60 seconds, 30, 15, whatever your wandering mind has time for). There were teams of editors and assistant editors, pacing producers and nebbish writers, graphics folks and sound engineers. And lowly runners. Sometimes Tom Cruise would ride up in a blacked-out Ford Excursion to pick at cheese plates and stand over an editor’s shoulder as she cut new versions of a Mission: Impossible III trailer. This is the grind.

I love movie trailers. I scour YouTube and my RSS feed for the latest ones and will spend hours watching them on the AppleTV Trailer app. A well-done trailer is like a little movie in and of itself. A good one doesn’t give away too much of a movie but gives you enough to make you want to see it. If you are a movie trailer fan, go to IMDB and check out some of your favourite movies from the 1930s-1970s. The style of trailers has changed remarkably over the years.