CNN:

Whether you hate tootsie rolls or licorice, the truth is we’ve all received Halloween candy we don’t like. But this year, Reese’s is coming to the rescue with their very own candy exchange machine.

“Reese’s Halloween Candy Converter Machine” was first released to the public on Sunday, October 28, during a Halloween parade in Tarrytown, New York.

No tricks here. Trade in your Halloween candy for Reese's candy. What'd you expect from the GOAT of Halloween?! #ReesesCandyConverter #NotSorry pic.twitter.com/bTrjF2IFay

— REESE'S (@reeses) October 30, 2018

This is brilliant.

Laptop Magazine:

From the new 13-inch MacBook Air and super-light 12-inch MacBook to the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pros with the Touch Bar, Apple’s laptop lineup has never had more variety. But as a shopper, it can be tough to decide which notebook to get.

That’s where we come in. We’ll help you decide which MacBook is worth your money by comparing price, features, performance, battery life and more. Here’s the pros and cons of each model.

There’s a very helpful graphic attached to this post to really give you a good sense of the specs and offerings.

The Verge:

In crafting its most compelling iPad and MacBook Air to date, Apple also created a major headache for people like me. I’m a member of that classic Intel ultrabook demographic whose computing needs are light but constant. You won’t catch me doing 3D modeling or 4K video production on my laptop, but I do a litany of small tasks online, in a word processor, or in Adobe’s Lightroom. I’ve been using a MacBook Pro for two years that does most of what I want, but it really doesn’t last long enough. Now, Apple is offering me the much better battery life I need with the high-quality display I desire, but it’s fragmented the choice. Both the new MacBook Air and new iPad Pro could be the ideal computer for me.

This will be an interesting problem for many of us. I’m in the market for a new device and am torn between these two new offerings. What would push me over the edge to the iPad Pro would be for Adobe to (soon!) announce the full version of Lightroom is available for the iPad Pro, as they announced for Photoshop.

Kyle Wiens, iFixit:

This is the kind of tale that you don’t hear every day. Erik Wooldridge is a Systems Specialist at Morris Hospital near Chicago. During the installation of a new GE Healthcare MRI machine, he started getting calls that cell phones weren’t working. Then, some Apple Watches started glitching.

This is just an incredible read. Don’t want to give anything away, just dig in. Great story, well told.

BBC News:

A professor of surgery says students have spent so much time in front of screens and so little time using their hands that they have lost the dexterity for stitching or sewing up patients.

Roger Kneebone, professor of surgical education at Imperial College, London, says young people have so little experience of craft skills that they struggle with anything practical.

Fascinating. My kids all grew up as makers, crafters. They grew up sewing, soldering, painting and, in one case, learning how to sew a proper medical stitch.

I believe in teaching these sorts of skills. I wonder if future surgeons will have to take basic craft classes to qualify for medical school.

Reddit:

The baseline MacBook costs more than the MacBook Air and is a downgrade in literally every way. Smaller screen, older generation keyboard, 480p camera, no thunderbolt 3, only 1 port, worse CPUs that are from last generation, no Touch ID.

The MacBook no longer makes sense, and it didn’t even make sense compared to the baseline MacBook Pro.

Jim and I spent some time discussing this on yesterday’s Dalrymple Report. I do find the relationship between the MacBook Air and the MacBook a bit confusing.

Two comments from the linked Reddit thread:

I always thought that the Macbook was replacing the Macbook air, similar to what they did with the iPad

And:

You thought correctly. This new laptop is just a bigger MacBook (Retina). It’s not an Air. Apple is just calling it an Air for marketing purposes. It has the same screen type and Y-series CPU as the Retina, not the U-series as the Air uses.

Instead calling the product lineup the MacBook 12″ and MacBook 13″, they’re calling it the MacBook and the New MacBook Air.

One possible motivation for this move, aside from giving the (MacBook Air) people what they want, is addressed in this thoughtful Op-Ed piece from Ben Lovejoy:

When Apple launched the iPhone X, it did more than just change the design language of the iPhone: it also offered a whole new pricing level. Not just for iPhones, but for any smartphone. It was a move that has significantly boosted the average selling price (ASP) of the iPhone range as a whole.

This is a trick Apple is now repeating with the 2018 MacBook Air

Interesting. Is this ASP ladder-climbing, an effort to raise the price of the entry level Mac? Though I do find the branding a bit confusing between the MacBook and MacBook Air, there’s no doubt that Apple is genius when it comes to product pricing.

Emil Protalinski, VentureBeat:

Apple CEO Tim Cook announced during the company’s “More in the Making” event in New York City that Apple has hit a new milestone: 100 million active Mac users. He added that 51 percent of Mac buyers are “new to Mac” and noted that in China that figure is 76 percent, highlighting growth in the world’s most populous country.

And:

By comparison, there are about 1.5 billion active Windows PCs.

Consider this point, made on Twitter by Horace Dediu:

40% of all Macs ever sold are still in use.

I wonder if you ignored the first 10 years of Mac purchases, if that 40% number would drop, even to 39%. To me, this says a ton about the impact the success of the iPhone and the evolution of the Apple ecosystem has had on the Mac.

MacRumors:

Given all of the changes introduced in the Apple Pencil 2, it only works with the new 11 and 12.9-inch iPad Pro models and it is not compatible with older iPad Pros or the sixth-generation iPad.

Likewise, the current Apple Pencil will not work with the new iPad Pro models and is limited to older iPad Pro models and the sixth-generation iPad.

This should come as no surprise to anyone who watched today’s video and no, this is not Apple being “greedy”.

Apple:

From the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Howard Gilman Opera House. Here’s what we announced.

Being in New York seems to have given the event an extra special energy.

Apple today gave Mac mini a massive increase in performance. Now with quad- and 6-core processors, up to 64GB of faster memory and blazing fast all-flash storage, the new Mac mini delivers an insane five times faster performance, making it the most powerful Mac mini ever made. And with Thunderbolt 3 ports, the Apple T2 Security Chip and a 10Gb Ethernet option, the new Mac mini is a faster and more capable desktop that can do so much more.

Mac mini is a funny machine. I’m not surprised they released a new version, but then again, I wouldn’t have been surprised if they hadn’t. I think this is definitely a great upgrade though.

Apple today introduced an all-new MacBook Air, bringing a stunning 13-inch Retina display, Touch ID, the latest processors and an even more portable design to the world’s most loved notebook. Delivering the all-day battery life it’s known for, the new MacBook Air is available in three gorgeous finishes — gold, space gray and silver. The most affordable Retina-display Mac ever also includes an Apple-designed keyboard, a spacious Force Touch trackpad, faster SSDs, wide stereo sound, the Apple T2 Security Chip and Thunderbolt 3, making the new MacBook Air the perfect notebook to take with you everywhere you go.

I had several MacBook Airs over the years and loved the portability. If there was one thing missing, it was power and advanced technology, but not anymore.

Apple today introduced the new iPad Pro with all-screen design and next-generation performance, marking the biggest change to iPad ever. The all-new design pushes 11-inch and 12.9-inch Liquid Retina displays to the edges of iPad Pro and integrates Face ID to securely unlock iPad with just a glance. The A12X Bionic chip with next-generation Neural Engine in iPad Pro outperforms most PC laptops and offers a new USB-C connector, Gigabit-class LTE, and up to 1TB of storage to enable powerful new mobile workflows.

It is absolutely stunning how powerful these new iPad Pros are. We expected Face ID, but adding USB-C and the A12X Bionic really make these new devices something incredible.

The iPhone XR, famously, does not have a telephoto lens. David Smith worked out a way to see how often he’s used the telephoto in the past, with his iPhone X:

I’m trying out the XR, but was curious how much I’ll actually miss the telephoto lens.

I realized I can check using a smart album in Photos on the Mac. For me the telephoto was used in only 16% of my iPhone X photos. pic.twitter.com/N3YRjp4cFL

— David Smith (@_DavidSmith) October 29, 2018

In a nutshell, he jumped into Mac Photos and created a smart album based purely on focal length, which eliminated all but images taken with the telephoto lens. Very smart.

This is a fantastic look at how smartphone cameras capture and handle depth in photos. This is a fascinating read all the way around.

It’s from the Halide blog, and does get into how the Halide camera app expands on the iPhone XR’s “humans only” portrait mode. But there’s lots of interesting tidbits here.

One in particular stood out for me:

It seems the iPhone XR has two advantages over the iPhone XS: it can capture wider angle depth photos, and because the wide-angle lens collects more light, the photos will come out better in low light and have less noise.

Remember how we said the XR’s Portrait mode is only available on human portraits? When it comes to faces, you never want to photograph a person up close with a wide angle lens, as it distorts the face in an unflattering way.

That means you really have to take portraits on the iPhone XR from medium shot (waist-up). If you want a close-up headshot, kind of like the iPhone XS, you’ll have to crop, which means you’ll lose a lot of resolution. A wide angle lens isn’t always a plus.

Jump to the blog post, check out the images, especially those that compare the iPhone XR and XS side by side. Be sure to read the captions.

Sometimes, the iPhone XR will take nicer-looking Portrait photos than any other iPhone, including the XS and XS Max.

But most of the time, the XS will probably produce a better result.

Short term, the XR is going to give you better results in low light, because of the wider aperture, which lets in more light. But over time, I believe machine learning is going to conquer that physical limitation, and we’ll see new generations of iPhone cameras that produce unbelievable low light images.

This morning’s Apple event starts 3 hours earlier than most, since it takes place on the east coast, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (I love their URL, bam.org).

You can watch the event on your Apple device, either via the Apple Special Events web page or on the Apple Events app on your Apple TV.

Speaking of the Apple Special Events web page: Each time you reload the page, you’ll get a different version of the event invite artwork. What does it all mean? Guess we’ll find out soon.

Apple:

iOS 12.1 will be available Tuesday, October 30, bringing Group FaceTime and more than 70 new emoji to iPhone and iPad. FaceTime changed the way people communicate and share important moments, and now with Group FaceTime, it’s easy to chat with more people than ever before — from 2 to 32 people. iOS 12.1 also brings Depth Control in real-time preview and Dual SIM support to iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max and iPhone XR customers.

Here’s a link to the new emoji sets.

I do love the new emoji. They are beautifully rendered, no doubt. But I do wish Apple would take the “Add to Favorites” model used on the Mac’s Character Viewer to allow me to mark specific favorite emoji to make them easier to find. The more emoji we add, the harder an individual emoji is to find.

There is a Frequently Used section on my iOS emoji keyboard, but emoji fall off that view as others are used. And the ever-changing view of the Frequently Used emoji makes it hard to develop any sort of muscle memory.

Love this. Jump to the page, type in a sequence of words or letters, and the site will generate a mnemonic to help you remember the words.

Type in the planet names, or the guitar string open notes (E A D G B E), anything you like. Fun!

[H/T @bobtiki]

Lots of discussion of the camera in this Daring Fireball review rollup. Specifically, the absence of the telephoto lens on the iPhone XR.

As you read this (and, if you are considering the XR, you should), think about how you use your current iPhone camera. If you have an iPhone with a telephoto lens, do you ever use it? When you bring up your camera, do you ever tap the 1x (the 1x turns into a 2x) to switch cameras? Note that in low light, you’ll likely get digital zoom, not the telephoto, but wanted to set the stage for reading the Daring Fireball piece.

Seems to me, this is an overlooked part of the camera interface. If you live your life in the wide angle lens, you won’t miss the telephoto if you move to the iPhone XR.

Another interesting bit from the rollup was something I alluded to in this post from earlier this morning. From this Rene Ritchie iPhone XR review for iMore:

Less fine is the sudden loss of Z-axis asymmetry thanks to the shoved down Lightning port on iPhone XR.

Rene is referring to the image embedded in the post showing the Lightning port not being aligned with the screws. It’s “shoved down” to make room for the LCD display. And as John Gruber points out, once you see it, you can’t unsee it. No big deal, but interesting, at least to the design nerd in me.

Guilherme Rambo, 9to5Mac:

One of the new features of Apple Watch Series 4 is the ability to take an Electrocardiogram of the user’s heart through a series of new sensors on the back of the device and on the revised digital crown. Since this feature requires regulatory approval by health authorities, Apple Watch ECG will roll out to users in the United States first, where Apple was able to get clearance from the FDA.

But if you are outside of the United States?

This limitation is not enforced by hardware, and if you buy an Apple Watch Series 4 in any country, it includes the new sensors. Looking at code within iOS related to the ECG feature, we’ve been able to confirm that its limitation to the US will be based on the software region of the user’s devices (iPhone and Apple Watch).

Read the article for the key to changing your region and for the distinction between region and language. Very interesting.

Beyond all the usual teardown detail, there are two things of note worth a look in the iFixit article:

• In Step 6, you’ll see a modular SIM card reader, much easier to replace and not requiring a logic board swap. Small thing, but interesting.

• Much more interesting to me, take a look at the image in Step 3. There are two major differences between the iPhone XS, on the top, and the iPhone XR, on the bottom. One difference is obvious: The XR has no antenna band. But can you spot the other difference? It’s quite subtle.

Rather than spoil it here, I’ll post about it in a few minutes, when I get to the Daring Fireball iPhone XR review roundup.