Mental Floss:

In Sweden, there will soon be an entire institution devoted to these abandoned, ridiculed ideas. The Museum of Failure, opening in Helsingborg, Sweden on June 7, showcases innovations that fell flat, from Bic for Her to Harley Davidson perfume, asking visitors to consider what we can learn from these failures.

I don’t know that I’d visit this museum and I’ve never heard of “Coke II”.

Petapixel:

What kind of images does a $63,000 stills camera produce? Here’s a 19-minute video by Ted Forbes of The Art of Photography in which he uses a Phase One XF medium format DSLR to show the bang for your buck that you get when you spend 63 grand on a camera kit.

The Phase One XF is a medium-format camera built with a modular design. That means you can interchange not only the lenses but also the backs of the camera. In this particular setup, the new $50,000 Phase One IQ3 monochrome back is being tested.

This may be blasphemous to professional photographers (or it may be because I’m looking at the images via a web browser) but the composition of the sample images (and the images on the video) is kind of boring and you can’t really see where the $63,000 value is.

Apple:

Get to know iPhone X. Meet the newest member of the iPhone family and learn what makes it different.

Apple has updated their online User Guide for iPhones with info about the iPhone X. A good read while you wait for UPS to arrive.

Apple:

There are situations where Apple can improve the user experience by getting insight from what many of our users are doing, for example: What new words are trending and might make the most relevant suggestions? What websites have problems that could affect battery life? Which emoji are chosen most often? The challenge is that the data which could drive the answers to those questions—such as what the users type on their keyboards—is personal.

Apple has adopted and further developed a technique known in the academic world as local differential privacy to do something really exciting: gain insight into what many Apple users are doing, while helping to preserve the privacy of individual users. It is a technique that enables Apple to learn about the user community without learning about individuals in the community. Differential privacy transforms the information shared with Apple before it ever leaves the user’s device such that Apple can never reproduce the true data.

This is a really interesting paper from Apple describing how they gather data from users but anonymize that data. Of course, all you’re going to read from most media outlets is “Here are the most popular emoji!” And people wonder why Apple “dislikes” the media.

SeattleMet:

When she picked up the phone that day, she had no idea this mysterious cinnamon roll project would ultimately become a national brand with 1,200 franchised locations in 48 countries. Or that people would still ask her for autographs and photos nearly four decades later.

This singular product of 1980s mall culture sprang to life in a test kitchen. Its unrepentant decadence remains lodged in our psyche.

Lobster. Cinnabons. Those are the only two foods I find absolutely irresistible and will never turn down a chance to eat in amounts that would terrify lesser men. Just the smell of Cinnabons in a mall will have me salivating and immediately buying a half dozen of the gigantic, sugary, cinnamon-filled balls of doughy heaven. And I’ll have eaten at least two of them before I even leave the mall.

Lifehacker:

One of the many ways Apple sets its smartphones apart from the herd is with special ringtones, dating back to the original iPhone and its iconic Marimba melody. The iPhone X is no different. It features an exclusive default ringtone called “Reflection.”

The first thing you’ll need to do is download the Reflection audio file onto a Mac or PC.

Sounds like a great idea but is their methodology not working for anyone else? Trying to drag the new ringtone into iTunes for me doesn’t get me anywhere.

Tripp Mickle, Wall Street Journal:

Long lines outside of Apple stores around the world showed strong initial demand for the new iPhone X, but analysts said the real test would be the company’s ability to sustain that level of interest over the coming months as it works through supply bottlenecks.

This really puzzles me. That word “but” in the middle of that paragraph. This good news followed by doomsaying seems so unnecessary.

Tim Cook said this on yesterday’s results call:

There’s always doubting Thomases out there and I’ve been hearing those for the 20 years I’ve been here and suspect I’ll hear about them until I retire. (laughs) I don’t really listen to that too much.

But I digress.

Sales of the iPhone X began Friday, and hundreds of customers lined up in Australia and Singapore, aiming to be among the first in the world to get their hands on the most expensive iPhone ever, sometimes using the buy now pay later no credit check companies for loans to get them, with a starting price of $999 and features including an edge-to-edge display and a facial-recognition system.

And:

At an Apple store in central Sydney, lines snaked around the corner midmorning local time, despite the store opening at 8 a.m., an hour earlier than usual, to cope with expected demand.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen these lines, and these are not isolated cases. At the very least, this shows a deep level of excitement for the iPhone X.

My take on the iPhone X is that it is not the latest iPhone, but the first in a brand new line of iPhones. So much new technology, wrapped in a new form factor, with its own uniquely tweaked interface. The return of these lines shows how excited people are to watch their beloved iPhones evolve into something new.

The fact that people are so motivated to get up, go to an Apple Store, and be part of the line-waiting social experience is a harbinger, not of doom, but of rebirth. Numbers, shmumbers. The iPhone X is already a huge win for Apple.

Nice gallery from Apple showing people buying the newest shiny in Apple Stores in Dubai, Shanghai, Singapore, Tokyo, and Sydney.

A lot of happy faces.

CNET:

Three “husky” men in hoodies driving a white Dodge van broke into a UPS truck Wednesday while it was parked outside a San Francisco Apple Store.

It was delivering 313 of Apple’s new iPhone X devices, according to a police report. The theft happened between 11:15 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. PT.

The total value of the stolen merchandise was estimated to be more than $370,000. The iPhone X, which becomes available in stores Friday, starts at $999 apiece. The suspects haven’t yet been caught.

More importantly:

People who planned to pick up their preordered iPhones at the Stonestown store will still get their devices on time, a person familiar with the matter said.

313 iPhones is a cube about 8 x 8 x 5 iPhone boxes. That’s ballpark, 25″ x 30″ x 30″. And that cube is worth more than $370K. That’s IF the thieves can sell the phones for anywhere near their value, if at all.

And a quick thinking janitor snapped a picture of the thieves unloading the UPS truck. If they catch the thieves, hope Apple gives that janitor an iPhone X.

Lots of interesting images, including some nice shots of the iPhone X next to the original iPhone.

Highlights include the pic showing the main innards (with two separate battery cells), and a cool little video showing the Face ID projector in action.

After every Apple results call, I look forward to stepping through Jason Snell’s charts. They make the results much easier to understand.

Start with the revenue-by-category pie chart to get a sense of where the money comes from, then take a look at the year-over-year charts to get a sense of how each segment is doing compared the the same period a year ago.

Jason’s post also contains insights on the comments made on the call as well. If you care about Apple’s business side, this is a good read.

Lots of insight from Tim Cook and the rest of the team from yesterday’s Q42017 earnings call, as transcribed by iMore’s Mikah Sargent. Thanks, Mikah.

There are a few helpful tips on the page to help users get used to the new buttons and how to do some of the basic iPhone tasks.

Computerworld:

Wireless charging technology has been around for more than 100 years, but its inclusion in devices such as Apple’s new iPhone line has given it new life. Here’s how it works, and why it could soon show up in everything from homes to robots.

Another good explanation of what the future holds for many of our devices and gadgets.

Upwork, the largest freelancing website, today released its newest quarterly index of the hottest skills in the U.S. freelance job market. The Upwork Skills Index ranks the site’s 20 fastest-growing skills and is part of a quarterly series that sheds light on new and emerging skills freelancers are providing. This comes on the heels of the “Freelancing in America: 2017” study, the most comprehensive measure of the U.S. independent workforce, which found that 57.3 million Americans (36 percent of the U.S. workforce) freelanced in the past year and also predicts that the majority of the U.S. workforce will freelance within a decade.

This is pretty interesting data because it comes from a freelance website. Demand for Final Cut Pro grew more than 200 percent year-over-year, while Swift grew 100 percent.

lifehacker:

Shortly is an iOS and Android app that pulls top-rated stories from Reddit’s /r/writingprompts community. Pulling from the best of the community’s short stories usually means you’ll read interesting takes on prompts like “You’re a killer dumping your latest victim into the river. Just as you’re about to be done, you spot another person. Doing exactly the same thing. And they’ve just spotted you, too.”

When you open Shortly, you can choose between a one, three, or five-minute story from the community, and you’ll be able to see the story’s writing prompt along with the story itself.

I use Pocket for my non-fiction stuff but this is a great way to get quick hits of some very good fiction.

Petapixel:

software developer Macphun (soon to be Skylum) has announced Luminar 2018, a digital photo editor and organizer that’s aiming to be a direct competitor to Adobe Lightroom.

Unlike past versions of Macphun software, Luminar 2018 is available for both Mac and Windows users. Not only that, but the new software boasts “major speed boosts” compared to its predecessor.

Offering “everything a modern photographers needs,” Luminar 2018 has many of the features and functions that will be familiar to Lightroom users.

This is a very steep hill to climb and I wish Macphun all the best in the attempt. More competition/software is good for users.

This is a long review, chock full of detail. Definitely worth your time.

A few pieces on Face ID, just to give you a taste:

Here’s where there’s a difference between Touch ID and Face ID: Touch ID throws away the original enrollment images of your fingerprints almost immediately. Face ID keeps the original enrollment images of your face (but crops them as tightly as possible so as not to store background information). That’s for convenience. Apple wants to be able to update the neural networks for Face ID without you having to re-register your face each time.

And:

The True Depth camera reads the data and captures a randomized sequence of 2D images and depth maps which are then digitally signed and send to the Secure Enclave for comparison. (Randomization also protects against spoofing attacks.)

The portion of the Neural Engine inside the Secure Enclave converts the captured data into math and the secure Face ID neural networks compare it with the math from the registered face. If the math matches, a “yes” token is released and you’re on your way. If it doesn’t, you need to try again, fall back to passcode, or stay locked out of the device.

And:

None of the neural networks have yet been trained to distinguish multiple registered faces. They can tell you or not you, but not you, someone else, and not either of you. That’s a level of complexity beyond the first iteration of the system. Right now, very few people reportedly register multiple fingers for Touch ID, but Apple could add that functionality to a future implementation of Face ID, if there’s significant demand.

Yesterday, we posted an op-ed from Ben Lovejoy saying:

My guess is that doing all these checks for more than one person would make face-recognition noticeably slower than Touch ID, and Apple was concerned that reviewers and consumers alike wouldn’t respond well to that. That, I think, is the real reason Apple limits Face ID to a single face.

Rene’s take is that the system was not yet designed to handle more than a single face, that it’s not an issue of CPU performance, but of neural network design. All interesting.

One last excerpt, that connects to something we posted earlier this morning, about the ACLU and privacy concerns:

What developers can’t do is get your face data. Just like apps never got access to your fingerprints with Touch ID, they never get access to your face data with Face ID.

Once the app asks for authentication, it hands off to the system, and all it ever gets back is that authentication or rejection. Apple has a separate system, built into ARKit, the company’s augmented reality framework, that provides basic face tracking for Animoji or any apps that want to provide similar functionality, but it only gets rudimentary mesh and depth data, and never gets anywhere near Face ID data or the Face ID process.

This is just a tiny taste of Rene’s review. A fascinating read. One smart cookie.

Weird, and perhaps a comment on how deeply Apple and the iPhone have penetrated our social conscience.

The video in the linked post shows a mass of people chaotically queueing up to buy an iPhone X at the Orchard Road Apple Store in Singapore.

This did take me back to the early days, when every iPhone release was met by mobs like this. I’m told that much of this crowd is scalpers, many from other countries, trying to get their piece of the pie.

Keep an eye out for the Apple employee who tries to provide order by restarting the line, only to have the chaos recreate itself.

[H/T Mr E]

Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac:

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has raised privacy concerns about developer access to the facial expressions of iPhone X users. In particular, they say that Apple allows developers to capture facial expression data and store it on their own servers.

When the iPhone X was launched, Apple was careful to stress that the 3D face recognition model used by Face ID was stored only on the phone itself. The data is never transferred to Apple servers. But the ACLU says that app developers are allowed to transmit and store some face data.

Interesting article. Lots of layers to this issue. There’s face tracking (think Animoji) and attention detection (are you actually watching your screen). How much of this data is hidden behind an API? In other words, does Apple simply tell a developer whether you are paying attention to the screen, or do they give you more specific data, like the current screen location on which you are currently focused?

This is a good read. And keep an eye out for more detail in the Rene Ritchie/iMore iPhone X review I’ll be posting a bit later this morning.

Update: There is no API for attention detection, therefore there is no way for developers to access it.

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

Apple has determined that some Apple Watch Series 3 models have an issue causing “edge stripes” to appear on the display after time.

In an internal memo distributed to Genius Bars and Apple Authorized Service Providers, Apple said the issue is to be treated like any other Apple Watch repair. Since the issue appears to be a manufacturing defect, the repair should be free under Apple’s standard one-year limited warranty policy.

If you have a GPS Series 3 Apple Watch, or plan to buy one, take a look at the image in Joe’s post so you know what to look for. Sounds like Apple acknowledges the issue, has your back if you do run into this.

Apple:

Join us here on November 2, 2017 at 2:00 p.m. PT / 5:00 p.m. ET to listen to the conference call live.

As usual, Apple will announce a metric buttload of profit and sales. And, as usual, expect a lot of unanswered and stupid questions from the assembled analysts on the call.