There are four models each for the iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and iPhone X. The models correspond to carriers and bands available for each phone.

Now that Apple no longer puts the model information on the back of the phone, you’ll need to dig into Settings or look in the SIM slot. Rene Ritchie lays out all the details.

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Apple Inc., seeking a breakthrough product to succeed the iPhone, aims to have technology ready for an augmented-reality headset in 2019 and could ship a product as early as 2020.

Unlike the current generation of virtual reality headsets that use a smartphone as the engine and screen, Apple’s device will have its own display and run on a new chip and operating system, according to people familiar with the situation.

And:

Apple began putting together a team to work on AR-related projects a couple of years ago, Bloomberg reported in March. Led by Mike Rockwell, who previously ran engineering at Dolby Labs, the group has now grown to several hundred engineers from across Apple, the people said. Scattered across office parks in both Cupertino and Sunnyvale, California, the team is working on several hardware and software projects under the umbrella code name of “T288.”

And:

The new operating system, internally dubbed “rOS” for “reality operating system,” is based on iOS, the iPhone’s operating system. Just as tvOS powers the Apple TV, macOS runs on Macs and watchOS runs on Apple Watches, “rOS” will power Apple’s AR headset. Geoff Stahl, formerly a software manager for games and graphics at Apple, is one of the directors of the “rOS” software group.

Take with a grain of salt, but none of this is hard to believe.

Ben Schoon, 9to5Google:

Almost every Android smartphone ships with an oleophobic coating on the glass, and the purpose of that is to help make fingerprints easier to get off of the display. In short, it keeps the oil from your fingertips from adhering to the glass, and it also makes water easier to wipe away.

Over time, this coating wears off, but it usually takes at least a few months or years of intense usage. On the Pixel 2 XL, however, some owners are having this come up within just a couple of weeks.

iPhones have shipped with an oleophobic coating, starting with the iPhone 3GS. This is mature technology. Surprising to see this issue crop up with the Pixel 2.

I’ve got an email in to Google PR asking about this issue, will update this post if and when I get a reply.

Twitter:

In September, we launched a test that expanded the 140 character limit so every person around the world could express themselves easily in a Tweet. Our goal was to make this possible while ensuring we keep the speed and brevity that makes Twitter, Twitter. Looking at all the data, we’re excited to share we’ve achieved this goal and are rolling the change out to all languages where cramming was an issue.

As a result, your timeline reading experience should not substantially change, you’ll still see about the same amount of Tweets in your timeline.

Twitter says it probably won’t affect your timeline much but that depends entirely on who you follow. I expect my timeline will explode in size.

The Verge:

The glasses company is cleverly using the iPhone’s camera to take maps of people’s faces, and use that data to recommend styles of glasses that will best fit your face. It’s a step beyond the digital try on system the company has previously offered, where it would try to place a virtual pair of glasses on a picture to let you see how it looks.

Sadly, I’m in the market for glasses but dread going in to a store to try them on. This might resolve that pain point for me.

TechCrunch:

Apple is soft-launching direct, person-to-person payments in an iMessage today with the Apple Pay Cash beta. The feature, which was announced earlier this year, allows you to send and receive cash inside the Messages app on iPhones.

The program is launching in public beta today on iOS 11.2 beta 2, and you can opt in using the iOS Public Beta program. Once you’ve updated, you’ll see an Apple Pay button in the apps section of Messages that allows you to initiate a payment. Payments can also be triggered by simply asking for money in a message or tapping on a message sent by someone else asking for money.

The beta is available for U.S. customers only with iOS devices on 11.2 or later and with two-factor authentication set up on their Apple ID.

Feel free to send me money as a test.

ZDNet:

Back before our phones did everything, computers sat on our desktops or in our briefcases. The idea of a pocket computing device was something of a dream, but until the mid-1990s, it was too difficult to engineer into something a mainstream consumer could afford to buy.

The Pilot 1000 was bare bones, especially by today’s standards. It had a 160×160 pixel display. There was no keyboard, neither on-screen nor BlackBerry-style. You entered information into the device by learning a new way to write, called Graffiti. This was a gesture language entered with a stylus where each letter was designed to be clearly distinct from every other. It wasn’t hard to learn, but it wasn’t instant, either.

Even so, the Palm devices found a sweet spot, both in terms of price and size.

For many of us, this article will be a wistful trip down memory lane. For many more of you, it will invoke pity of those of us old enough to have used a PalmPilot.

Motherboard:

At the forefront of modern telescopy is the Giant Magellan Telescope, the first device in a new class of ground-based optical instruments appropriately named “Extremely Large Telescopes.”

When the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) becomes operational in the early 2020s, its effective aperture—a way of measuring the optical ‘strength’ of a telescope—will be double the size of the largest optical telescopes operating today. This feat of engineering is largely the result of advances in manufacturing the giant lenses at the heart of the GMT, and no one knows this better than the scientists at the University of Arizona’s Mirror Lab, where astronomers go when they need some serious glass.

I love stories of the mysteries of our universe but equally fascinating to me are stories of how we design and build the devices that let us discover those mysteries.

SyFyWire, on an epic image of the moon created by artist Seán Doran:

I have seen the Moon countless times through my own telescopes in the past, and it’s never looked as breathtaking as this! Mind you, I had to shrink this shot considerably to get it to fit here; this is about 2,000 pixels wide.

And:

But then, this isn’t a single image: It’s a mosaic composed of images taken using the Wide Angle Camera (WAC) on board the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a NASA mission that has been circling the Moon since 2009.

And:

To get the correct perspective for the Moon as a globe, Doran took the images, along with altimeter data, and mapped them onto a sphere. That way features near the edge look foreshortened, as they really do when you look at the entire Moon. He also used Apollo images to make sure things lined up. So the image isn’t exactly scientifically rigorous, but it is certainly spectacular.

You can download a 16 MB version of the image here. Or go here and pan and zoom on a much larger version.

[Via Kottke.org]

Harry McCracken invented Animoji Karaoke about a week ago:

As I used a pre-release iPhone X this week, it suddenly occurred to me that it might be fun to lip-sync a song to an Animoji and have it mimic my performance. I dubbed the idea “Animoji Karaoke” and have been filling my Twitter feed with it. Judging from my likes, retweets, and comments, I haven’t just been entertaining myself; some people said that it redeemed Animoji or justifed buying a thousand-dollar phone. Even cynics have taken notice of my breakthrough.

Harry’s efforts have spawned a tidal wave of similar efforts. If you’ve never seen one before, here’s a great example:

And then we proceeded to waste half our day. #animojikaraoke #iphonex #queen #bohemianrapsody #carriedaway pic.twitter.com/4TBBg6qQKS

— Mia Harrison (@ManxomeMia) November 4, 2017

A few more worth checking out:

• Here’s a music video from Airplane Mode, done as an Animoji.
• A unicorn sings Always by Erasure.
• Here’s Luke finding out who his father is (might need to bump the volume on this one).
• And one of my favorites, the Star Wars theme, as sung by a crowd of Animoji.

Good stuff.

One thing I love about Austin Mann’s reviews is that they focus on real-life scenarios, as opposed to numbers and grades.

Read the review, check out all the images, watch the embedded videos. You’ll definitely get a sense of what Austin sees in the iPhone X display and camera.

One particular video to make sure you watch is the one embedded below. It shows the iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X displays side-by-side. The difference in the black-point for each display is obvious and, to me at least, surprisingly far apart. That iPhone X display is gorgeous.

Ever since the iPhone X rollout, I’ve been struggling to put into words that feeling the iPhone X brought to the table, something that’s been missing from iPhone rollouts for some time.

When iPhone X release day hit, lots of other people felt that thing. Suddenly, there were lines again. The iPhone X display at the Apple Store was mobbed. That magic thing was back.

Ben Thompson, Stratechery:

I’m spoiled, I know: gifted with the rationalization of being a technology analyst, I buy an iPhone every year. Even so, I thought the iPhone 7 was a solid upgrade: it was noticeably faster, had an excellent screen, and the camera was great; small wonder it sold in record number everywhere but China.

What it lacked, though — and I didn’t fully appreciate this until I got an iPhone X — was delight.

Yup. That’s the word. Delight.

Face ID isn’t perfect: there are a lot of edge cases where having Touch ID would be preferable. By its fourth iteration in the iPhone 7, Touch ID was utterly dependable and, like the best sort of technology, barely noticeable.

FaceID takes this a step further: while it takes a bit of time to change engrained habits, I’m already at the point where I simply pick up the phone and swipe up without much thought; authenticating in apps like 1Password is even more of a revelation — you don’t have to actually do anything.

And:

The trick Apple pulled, though, was going beyond that: the first time I saw notifications be hidden and then revealed (as in the GIF above) through simply a glance produced the sort of surprise-and-delight that has traditionally characterized Apple’s best products.

Apple has found its inner delight. And that, as Ben so rightly puts it, is Apple at its best.

DisplayMate:

Switching from LCDs to OLEDs is a major engineering and manufacturing challenge, so I was eager to test and evaluate the new OLED iPhone X.

The result: Apple has produced an impressive Smartphone display with excellent performance and accuracy, which we cover in extensive detail below. What makes the iPhone X the Best Smartphone Display is the impressive Precision Display Calibration Apple developed, which transforms the OLED hardware into a superbly accurate, high performance, and gorgeous display, with close to Text Book Perfect Calibration and Performance!

There is a huge amount of detail here, a terrific take on OLED and on the iPhone X display in particular. No small feat for Apple that DisplayMate named the iPhone X as Best Smartphone Display.

[H/T John Kordyback]

MacStories:

Auto-renewing subscriptions were made available to all app developers with iOS 10 and already include the option to offer a free trial. With iOS 11.2 though, developers will have added flexibility to help them attract customers.

Whether we like them or not, Apple is going to do app store subscriptions. How app developers implement it and use it will be very interesting.

Apple believes every company has a responsibility to pay its taxes, and as the largest taxpayer in the world, Apple pays every dollar it owes in every country around the world. We’re proud of the economic contributions we make to the countries and communities where we do business.

With all of the misinformation out there, Apple felt the need to set the record straight about taxes.

The justices left in place a 2016 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that upheld a verdict that found South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co Ltd had infringed Apple Inc’s patents on several popular features of the California-based company’s iPhone. Those included slide-to-unlock, autocorrect and quick links, which automatically turn information like addresses and phone numbers into links.

Stop stealing and pay the money.

After a week of R&D, we found that we could indeed download apps just like iTunes used to. We decided to build a completely new app management section, which we are releasing in iMazing 2.5 (macOS) as part of our 100% free features.

To our knowledge, iMazing is the only non-Apple software to enable users to download their purchases from the iOS App Store. We strongly hope that Apple won’t block iMazing’s app download capabilities: we’ve done our best to provide tools which many iOS users truly need.

I’ve been a user and fan of iMazing for a long time. These new features are welcome to those of us who still want to manage our iPhones from our Macs.

Lots of interesting tidbits in the linked TechCrunch article. Here are a few highlights:

As we’ve covered off in detail before Apple does not have access to the depth-mapped facial blueprints that users enroll when they register for Face ID. A mathematical model of the iPhone X user’s face is encrypted and stored locally on the device in a Secure Enclave.

Face ID also learns over time and some additional mathematical representations of the user’s face may also be created and stored in the Secure Enclave during day to day use

And:

The key point here is that Face ID data never leaves the user’s phone (or indeed the Secure Enclave). And any iOS app developers wanting to incorporate Face ID authentication into their apps do not gain access to it either. Rather authentication happens via a dedicated authentication API that only returns a positive or negative response after comparing the input signal with the Face ID data stored in the Secure Enclave.

Some people have pointed to the detailed face mapping accessed via ARKit and expressed concerns about privacy with 3rd party developers access to that data:

With the iPhone X developers can access ARKit for face-tracking to power their own face-augmenting experiences — such as the already showcased face-masks in the Snap app.

“This new ability enables robust face detection and positional tracking in six degrees of freedom. Facial expressions are also tracked in real-time, and your apps provided with a fitted triangle mesh and weighted parameters representing over 50 specific muscle movements of the detected face,” writes Apple.

And:

Now it’s worth emphasizing that developers using this API are not getting access to every datapoint the TrueDepth camera system can capture. This is also not literally recreating the Face ID model that’s locked up in the Secure Enclave — and which Apple touts as being accurate enough to have a failure rate as small as one in one million times.

The data being shared via ARKit is a small sample of what’s used for Face ID, and it is missing key details, like attention detection data.

The linked article goes into a lot more detail and is an interesting read.

As to how Face ID works, take a look at the video embedded in this tweet from The Verge’s Nilay Patel. Before you click, note that there are flashing lights that might trigger a reaction in some people. The embedded video really gives a sense of the dot projector at work. Fascinating stuff.

From the App: The Human Story web site:

With the launch of the iPhone and subsequent devices, developers found themselves with a worldwide market hungry for their innovations: apps.

Yet, a renaissance needs cultivation, not exploitation. Ten years in, is the opportunity gone? Will artists find a way to create tools that elevate the human experience, or will the market be valued even above the impact to the future of the industry?

I am really looking forward to seeing this. Enjoy the trailer.

Over the weekend, a steadily growing number of iPhone users were reporting a bug where they’d type the letter “i”, but iOS would autocorrect it to “A” plus a strange symbol (a “?” in a box).

Contrary to some rumors, this behavior is not spreading from phone to phone, or via Twitter. It is limited to iOS 11.1 and any spread is due to updates to iOS 11.1 and spread of awareness.

Note that not everyone running iOS 11.1 sees this and it is not clear what triggers this behavior.

Apple posted this knowledge base article suggesting you do a text replacement for the letter “i”. Obviously, that’s a temporary workaround until Apple releases a patch, which should be soon.

As to the cause, here’s Jeremy Burge from Emojipedia:

What’s really going on is that the letter “I” is being appended with an invisible character known as Variation Selector 16 when auto-correct kicks in to replace the lowercase “i”.

This VS-16 character is intended to be used to make the previous character have emoji appearance.[1] When used in conjunction with the letter “I” it displays in some apps as “A ⍰”.

The correct behaviour should be to ignore the invisible variation selector if the previous character doesn’t have an emoji version.

Here’s more detail on Variation Selector 16.

This will all be a bad (fond?) memory in a few days, when Apple ships their patch and it quickly makes its way to iPhones around the world.

UPDATE: And there’s this tweet, showing the “i” bug mutating. Is autocorrect learning?

From this Apple support document:

OLED technology delivers an incredibly high contrast ratio and high resolution. And with no backlight, OLED emits light through each pixel, allowing for a thinner display. The Super Retina display overcomes challenges with traditional OLED displays with its high brightness, wide color support, and has the best color accuracy in the industry.

If you look at an OLED display off-angle, you might notice slight shifts in color and hue. This is a characteristic of OLED and is normal behavior. With extended long-term use, OLED displays can also show slight visual changes. This is also expected behavior and can include “image persistence” or “burn-in,” where the display shows a faint remnant of an image even after a new image appears on the screen. This can occur in more extreme cases such as when the same high contrast image is continuously displayed for prolonged periods of time. We’ve engineered the Super Retina display to be the best in the industry in reducing the effects of OLED “burn-in.”

The post offers some best practices for the so-called Super Retina display (incredibly gorgeous, by the way). If there’s an iPhone X in your future, take a look.

[Via MacRumors]

CNET:

I took our Space Gray iPhone X out to the sidewalk in front of CNET’s San Francisco offices: a place where many screens have met their doom.

Is it just me or are these kinds of “tests” utterly ridiculous? Of course glass things break when you drop them. Is this really a surprise to anyone?

Not good considering it was the first drop.

Is CNET really unclear how dropping things works? What difference does it make if it’s the first drop or the tenth? Do they think that the phone gets less durable the more you drop it?

Is the iPhone X more fragile than past iPhones? Tough to say, because none of our tests are scientific.

Then maybe you should leave the “testing” to those who can do it scientifically. Regardless, it seems to be pretty much common sense that, when you drop things, they sometimes break.

alphr:

Today is the 60th anniversary of Laika – a Moscow stray – being blasted off Earth to become the first dog in space. In honour of the occasion, here is Duncan Geere’s piece on the full history of the Soviet’s canine space team.

I knew the Soviets had sent Laika into orbit but I didn’t know of her tragic before and after story.

Digital Camera World:

From the strap you use to carry your camera comfortably to hard drives on which you store years’ worth of creations, accessories are the supporting players that we can’t do without.

Here, we’ve gone through the recent issues of Digital Camera, N-Photo, PhotoPlus and Digital Photographer magazines to find the gear that’s impressed us the most, and also added some longstanding favourites that will make your shooting, editing and image management easier.

Got a photographer in your life you need Christmas gift(s) for? This is a varied list with all kinds of price points on some cool accessories for your shooter.

CERN:

The Kilogram doesn’t weigh a kilogram any more.

Together with six other units – metre, second, ampere, kelvin, mole, and candela – the kilogram, a unit of mass, is part of the International System of Units (SI) that is used as a basis to express every measurable object or phenomenon in nature in numbers. This unit’s current definition is based on a small platinum and iridium cylinder, known as “le grand K”, that weighs exactly one kilogram. The cylinder was crafted in 1889 and, since then, has been kept safe under three glass bell jars in a high-security vault on the outskirts of Paris.

There is one problem: the current standard kilogram is losing weight. About 50 micrograms, at the latest check. Enough to be different from its once-identical copies stored in laboratories around the world.

These stories have always fascinated me. I bet most people don’t realize the “official” kilogram is an actual physical object.