Petapixel:

Photographer and filmmaker Dustin Farrell spent the summer chasing lightning with a $110,000 Phantom Flex4K high-speed camera. What resulted was this 4K short film, titled “Transient,” that shows the epic beauty of lightning in 1,000fps slow motion.

Farrell writes that he spent over 30 days traveling over 20,000 miles this summer in search of storms. Most of the footage in this film was shot in Arizona in 1,000fps uncompressed raw.

This footage is so amazing, I’m tempted to call it fake. But it’s not and it’s spectacular.

SIM-free means, in part, that you won’t get a carrier SIM card. You’ll still need to get one. Keep that (to me, a tiny bit of a hassle) in mind.

UPDATE: From the comments:

You can get a SIM card for free from T-Mobile, and it takes seconds to install.

Meanwhile, that SIM-free iPhone—unlike the GSM models— is fully compatible with all networks including CDMA. More importantly, it has the Qualcomm chip, which means it will provide about 30% better wireless performance than Intel-equipped models in terms of data speeds, signal reception, voice quality, and battery life. And due to all of the above advantages, the SIM-free model will also provide a significantly higher resale value.

This is the iPhone variant everyone should buy.

UPDATE 2: Also from the comments:

Dave: it may also be worth mentioning that this is a great option if you already have a nano SIM card in your existing iPhone.

Duly noted.

1. Take this with a grain of salt. Could simply be a parsing error on Google’s web crawling bot. But still.
2. If you want the official word on the iMac Pro launch, here’s a link to Apple’s official iMac Pro notification page. Sign up and Apple will let you know when the iMac Pro launch is officially announced.

Daniel Eran Dilger, AppleInsider:

Rather than being the phenomenal, exciting new product category launch that pundits love to praise, the Alexa-powered Echo is Amazon’s salvaged booby prize for failing in smartphones: a few million units sold at low margin, versus the tens of millions of smartphones other Android licensees have been able to sell (or the hundreds of millions of high-margin iPhones Apple has been selling each year).

Ouch. But I agree with the premise. The Echo is a highly successful pivot. If Amazon’s 2014 Fire phone had caught on, it’s not clear that they would have gone down the Echo path.

Echo and related Alexa-based smart speakers are really “smart mics” for listening to commands. Amazon’s retail background works to leverage this to take online orders from Alexa users, but its original goal in hardware was a mobile phone with a camera, display and mic all working together to identify potential products to sell, not just a simple voice appliance. Amazon laid this out in excited detail at the Fire Phone launch, it just wasn’t able to sell it.

And:

Google’s Home is a straight up knock off of Echo, designed to counter the threat of Amazon reaching audiences of online buyers before they ever think to search Google.

And:

HomePod isn’t a “smart mic” seeking to force Siri into more places to intercept users’ attention. Despite cloying narratives of how Amazon is dominating the “smart speaker” market it created out of necessity after Fire Phone imploded in a cloud of smoke, Apple has always had a commanding lead in the number of people using its Siri voice assistant worldwide.

And:

Unlike Amazon, Apple isn’t trying to intercept buyers before they head to a retail store. Apple’s happy with connecting users with either stores or online retailers; Apple Pay works for both, and iOS apps create a blurring line that serves either, or both at the same time. Apple’s Siri doesn’t attempt to keep people out of rival apps or stores; it seeks to help them launch apps to find whatever they need.

And:

HomePod responds to Siri commands and passes them to your iPhone for launching apps or presenting a visual answer. But HomePod isn’t just a “smart mic” like Echo and Home. Primarily, It’s an intelligent speaker designed to produce exceptional home audio that intelligently fills whatever space it is installed in.

These are just snippets. There is so much more to process in this insightful, well written post, but the quotes laid out above should give you a basic sense of where Daniel is going with this.

Terrific job, definitely worth your time.

One more reason to upgrade your older Apple Watch.

Matt Birchler, in the introduction to a week long review of the Pixel 2 running Android Oreo:

I have been using the Google Pixel 2, which is the latest and greatest Android phone out there. I chose this phone for my experiment because I wanted to leave no room for my conclusions to be colored by a bad OEM skin on top of Android or by a lower quality phone as my comparisons to iOS should be as fair as possible. Since I wanted to review Oreo, a Pixel was my only option in October, and thankfully that Pixel has top of the like specs and the best Android camera out there. This is Android how Google intended it.

And, then, this TL;DR conclusion:

Android has grown up considerably over the last decade. It’s no longer a complete disaster of a user experience, and some elements have actually surpassed what Apple is doing with iOS. Notifications are much better than they are on iOS and Google Assistant is more accurate and more helpful than Siri. that said, there are a million little (and not so little) things that truly make Android a sub-par experience for me. Your milage may vary, but the abysmal third party software available for the platform, poor inter-app communication, and countless stability issues make Android a place I only want to visit for a month or two per year, not something I can see myself using full time.

Hop over to the front page of Matt’s blog to dig in. He’s got the intro and the first two parts of the review up on the site.

Josh Centers, TidBITS:

At this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple and Amazon finally announced that we would be able to watch Amazon video natively on the Apple TV by the end of the year.

And:

But it’s December, and Amazon Prime Video for the Apple TV remains vaporware. Is it still due in 2017? Surprisingly, yes. Amazon public relations told me, “Thanks for checking in. Yes, you can expect the launch this year.”

This report jibes with last week’s report that the Apple TV app was being beta tested by Amazon employees.

[Via DF]

Ars Technica:

According to a top Irish official, Apple has agreed to to pay Ireland around $15.4 billion in back taxes.

“We have now reached agreement with Apple in relation to the principles and operation of the escrow fund,” Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe told reporters before a meeting with European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, per Reuters.

“We expect the money will begin to be transmitted into the account from Apple across the first quarter of next year.”

This seems to be such an odd story. Ireland doesn’t want the money. Apple doesn’t want to pay the money. But the rules of the EU dictate the settlement. And how do you go about transmitting $15.4 billion “into the account”? Paypal?

Bloomberg:

Apple Inc.’s Tim Cook and Google’s Sundar Pichai made their first appearances at China’s World Internet Conference, bringing star power to a gathering the Chinese government uses to promote its strategy of tight controls online.

Apple’s chief executive officer gave a surprise keynote at the opening ceremony on Sunday, calling for future internet and AI technologies to be infused with privacy, security and humanity. The same day, one of China’s most-senior officials called for more aggressive government involvement online to combat terrorism and criminals. Wang Huning, one of seven men on China’s top decision-making body, even called for a global response team to go well beyond its borders.

Apple and Cook are walking a fine line between their corporate culture of user privacy and the Chinese government’s desire for control over those same users.

Om Malik talking about how a simple sound brought back powerful memories of his grandfather:

But to me, AI as we know it is nowhere close to having the intelligence of the human mind. I suspect my brain took random bits of metadata stored in my mind and constructed a good enough memory to bring a tear and a smile to my face.

That’s an interesting point. I can’t imagine that AI would be able to bring such an emotional response to something as simple as a sound that takes us back in time.

TidBITS:

Digital forensics firm Elcomsoft revealed this week that Apple has changed how encrypted iOS backups are protected, reducing security to improve the overall user experience.

Elcomsoft’s discovery kicked off a vigorous debate on Hacker News and Twitter, but does this change represent a real risk to the average Apple user? The answer is yes, but that answer has to be understood in the proper context. In absolute terms, Apple’s change is a step backward for iOS security, but the nuances of real-world usage suggest that Apple sees it as a net improvement for protecting user data from loss.

While I wish that Apple hadn’t made this change, and I do consider it a hit to my personal security, I can see where Apple is coming from and how the company may see it as enhancing the safety of user data. Let me explain.

After some friendly nudging by Dave Mark and I (and others), Rich Mogull comes up with his usual great explanation and cuts through the FUD.

Daily Mail:

The ground-breaking digital blue box was developed by Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak in 1972 and was the inventor’s first printed circuit board.

But the box was actually a hacking device that fooled a phone company’s switchboard by reproducing its specific tones.

As a result, the user was able to get free overseas phone calls in an era when making a long-distance call was hugely expensive.

Click through to the post. Some terrific pics and a video of Steve Jobs telling the blue box story. This is a piece of history I would love to own.

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities is today out with a new investor note, obtained by 9to5Mac. In the piece, Kuo breaks down how Apple is working to integrate faster and more versatile circuit boards across its product lineup come 2018.

Currently, the iPhone 8 and iPhone X both use a new flexible circuit board made from liquid crystal polymer. Both phones use it in their antenna designs, while the iPhone X also uses it in its TrueDepth camera. This LCP FPCB technology allows for high-speed and low-latency data transfer.

More detail in the post, but nice to see this terrific, space-saving, performance-increasing tech making its way over to the Apple Watch and Mac.

Makes me wonder if this is part of the supply-chain scheduling driving the iMac Pro and Mac Pro. The iMac Pro was announced at WWDC, said to ship this month (December 2017). And the Mac Pro is, well, anybody’s guess. But good to know this tech is coming.

Lots of goodies in the iOS 11.2 update. Biggest of all was the release of Apple Pay Cash. I’ve been playing with it, looks very useful. In a nutshell, you’ll tie a debit card to the Apple Pay Cash card in your wallet, then use the Apple Pay Cash card to send or receive cash. A bit like Venmo or PayPal, but tied in to the secure enclave.

The folks from MacRumors put together a nice intro to Apple Pay Cash that I found quite easy to follow. It’s embedded below.

Once you’ve installed the iOS 11.2 update, fire up the Wallet app and you’ll be prompted to set up Apple Pay Cash.

UPDATE: There have been some comments about Apple Pay Cash only being available in beta. While this might be true, I can tell you that I played with it on a phone running the beta as well as on a phone that has a public release of iOS 11.2. So, perhaps it’s the Apple Pay Cash server that’s in beta?

I think Emojipedia is a terrific resource. If you’ve not spent time here before, jump to the linked page, showing the emoji changes that came with this iOS release. First, there’s there’s the high resolution images of the 17 emoji that have changed.

To get a sense of these, take a look at the tumbler emoji. Here’s the old, iOS 11.1 version. And here’s the version updated for iOS 11.2.

I love the attention to detail here. The old one looks like a bit flat, and the scotch (or whatever is in it) looks cloudy. The new one looks more realistic.

[UPDATE: Apparently, the tumbler emoji was updated, then reverted back to the old version, then updated back to the new one, perhaps as a result of a QA oversight. Regardless, nice to see the design improvement.]

Another thing to note about this page is “all, changed, new, removed” links. Each gives you a different, useful view into the current emoji.

And, if you are interested, you can scroll down and tap on the links for previous versions of iOS, to see what was new with those releases. Good stuff.

JPL:

If you tried to start a car that’s been sitting in a garage for decades, you might not expect the engine to respond. But a set of thrusters aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft successfully fired up Wednesday after 37 years without use.

Voyager 1, NASA’s farthest and fastest spacecraft, is the only human-made object in interstellar space, the environment between the stars. The spacecraft, which has been flying for 40 years, relies on small devices called thrusters to orient itself so it can communicate with Earth. These thrusters fire in tiny pulses, or “puffs,” lasting mere milliseconds, to subtly rotate the spacecraft so that its antenna points at our planet. Now, the Voyager team is able to use a set of four backup thrusters, dormant since 1980.

This is incredible. Voyager 1 is 13 billion miles away, running on ancient computer code and JPL was able to use dormant thrusters to give it a nudge.

Open Culture:

In 1958, Merle Haggard saw Johnny Cash play in San Quentin, and went on to sing honest country songs for country outlaws. In 1982, future Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello saw Joe Strummer play with The Clash in Chicago and went on to play angry righteous rock for angry punks.

Hear Cash and Strummer sing Marley’s “Redemption Song,” with Morello on guitar. As one site succinctly put it, the recording represents “the first true punk rock star and the last. Together forever.”

Chills. Two of my favorite singers playing with one of my favorite guitarists on an amazing song.

Sebastiaan de With:

I am the design half of the team that makes the iPhone app Halide, which is a camera app with manual controls and, most importantly, RAW capture.

RAW affords you editing freedom. Absolute freedom to change the colors and white balance of a photo, or recover too-bright highlights and too-dark shadows.

However, as awesome as RAW is, it’s important to know RAW isn’t a magic “enhance” button. It’s helpful to understand how a RAW file is fundamentally different than JPEG, to fully understand the tradeoffs.

Great post and, now that I have an iPhone X, I’m really looking forward to using it with the Halide app and shooting and editing in RAW as I do with my DSLR.

Jeff Benjamin, 9to5Mac:

On the heels of launching a YouTube channel dedicated to how-to tutorial videos, Apple today pushed a significant version 2.0 update to its Apple Support app for iOS.

The app, which initially launched last November, received a major update back in the spring that allowed users to schedule repairs at participating Apple Authorized Service Providers, and provided broader access to Genius Bar reservations.

Today’s update adds a redesigned user interface, along with a new Discover tab dedicated to learning about your Apple products. In addition, the app also features the ability to search the company’s library of support articles, which can prove useful for finding solutions to specific issues.

Here’s a link to Apple’s official Support app.

I’m a big fan of Susan Kare’s work. All it takes is a quick scan of her Wikipedia page or this sample page of some of her Apple icons and you can see the impact she had on the original Mac, an impact that carries on to this day.

Susan is still very active as an artist and designer and has a collection of table linens just perfect for the old-school Mac lover in your life. This is definitely my cup of tea. Take a look.

BBC:

The 100-megawatt battery, built by Tesla, was officially activated on Friday. It had in fact provided some power since Thursday due to demand caused by local hot weather.

South Australia has been crippled by electricity problems in recent times.

As I understand it, the region is a leader in wind-power, but suffers blackouts when wind levels fall too far.

Elon Musk stepped in, said he’d have a 100 Megawatt backup battery built, delivered, installed and working within 100 days or he wouldn’t charge them a penny.

Great story.

From this very thoughtful post by Neil Cybart:

When introduced at WWDC 2017, HomePod was marketed as an iOS accessory that will serve as the best speaker people have ever owned. The $349 price certainly reflects this accessory mindset. While Apple briefly went over how HomePod will be able to serve as a type of smart home hub, it was almost more of an afterthought. At its core, Apple does not think the only function for stationary smart speakers is to pipe digital voice assistants.

And:

I don’t think stationary smart speakers represent the future of computing. Instead, companies are using smart speakers to take advantage of an awkward phase of technology in which there doesn’t seem to be any clear direction as to where things are headed. Consumers are buying cheap smart speakers powered by digital voice assistants without having any strong convictions regarding how such voice assistants should or can be used.

And:

If the goal is to rely on a digital voice assistant, an Apple Watch wearer has access to Siri at pretty much every waking moment. When simply wearing an Apple Watch, Siri is instantly available everywhere in the home. The same kind of access to Alexa would require five, ten, or maybe even 15 Echo speakers spaced strategically throughout the home (another reason why Echo sales are becoming increasingly misleading – some consumers may be buying a handful of $20 speakers at one time). With a cellular Apple Watch, Siri is now available outside the home even when users are away from their iPhones. Meanwhile, Alexa is stuck within four walls – at least until Amazon unveils its Alexa smartwatch.

To me, this is the core flaw in the argument I’ve frequently seen that HomePod is competing with Echo and Google Home, that Apple is late to the game.

Another way to look at it is, Amazon is late to the game. The Echo is a big seller, no doubt, but it is Amazon’s ingenious mechanism to get their digital voice assistant shoehorned into the space with Siri and Googly (my name for Google’s identity free voice assistant) when their phone strategy did not catch on.

Read the rest of Neil’s piece. It’s very interesting. I’m looking forward to the HomePod, to getting a sense of Apple’s long term strategy here.

Mikey Campbell, AppleInsider:

After a rocky start marked by a quick initial sellout and lingering supply issues, Apple is quickly catching up with iPhone X demand, with current U.S. delivery estimates pegging ship times at six business days.

I just checked and delivery now shows as December 11 (ten days from now). That’s still pretty good, and in plenty of time for gift-giving, if that’s your goal.

Even better, most models are showing available for pickup today. If you live near an Apple Store and an iPhone X is in your near future, check pickup availability for the model you crave. 64GB models are available today at most stores I checked, 256GB available at some, but far fewer.

Open Culture:

There has rarely ever been an artist more fully in command of as many different art forms as Orson Welles during his height – the late 1930s and early 40s. He revolutionized the stage, radio and cinema before the age of 26 and became a household name in the process.

Now you can listen to 61 hours of radio plays, all created by Welles for his 1930s radio show, The Mercury Theatre on the Air. The Spotify playlist includes A Christmas Carol, Heart of Darkness and even a rehearsal for Julius Caesar.

Most people only know of Orson Welles from his movies – Citizen Kane is arguably the greatest film of all time – but he started as a director of groundbreaking stage plays and radio dramas. I know what I’ll be listening to on my 24 hour plane flight to Sydney, Australia on Friday.

CNBC:

Apple has released a first-of-its-kind Heart Study app to research whether its Apple Watch can pick up a heart rhythmic disorder called atrial fibrillation — one of the most common causes of strokes and heart failure.

People who sign up for the study will use the watch to monitor their heart rate and heart rhythm and will consult with a physician if there’s an abnormality.

Atrial fibrillation is responsible for some 130,000 deaths every year in the U.S. alone.

Apple is continuing along a path that will take them to the Apple Watch becoming the preferred device for health monitoring.

Keith Enevoldsen:

This pictorial periodic table is colorful, fun, and packed with information. In addition to the element’s name, symbol, and atomic number, each element box has a drawing of one of the element’s main human uses or natural occurrences. The table is color-coded to show the chemical groupings. Small symbols pack in additional information: solid/liquid/gas, color of element, common in the human body, common in the earth’s crust, magnetic metals, noble metals, radioactive, and rare or never found in nature.

This is really cool. I used to know all of the elements (had to learn/memorize them in school) but we were never taught what some of them do, why they are important or how we use them. This illustration helps a lot.

Architectural Digest:

From the mysteries of Machu Picchu to the enigma of Blarney Castle to the gleaming white peaks of Chamonix, these destinations are not only historical but are served by these train journeys that truly evoke the period and style of the landscapes they roll past. Upgrade your experience by booking these ten journeys that offer luxury amenities, beautifully curated interiors, and true hospitality. From measured candlesticks to crystal vanities to plummeting heights, you’ll remember more than your final destination once you step on board these glamorous locomotives.

Like many people, I love trains but they aren’t the most efficient form of travel. If I had all the time and money in the world (many of these trips are not cheap), I’d definitely travel by train.

I was lucky enough as a student to take the train across Canada and the Banff to Vancouver section through the Canadian Rockies was utterly stunning.