iClarified:

A new video confirms previous reports that the 32GB iPhone 7 has 8X slower write speeds than the 128GB and 256GB models.

Unbox Therapy demonstrates a benchmark and real world test of write speeds on a 32GB and 256GB iPhone 7. The benchmark found that the 256GB model was able to write data at 341 MB/s; whereas, the 32GB was only able to write data at 42 MB/s.

The video is embedded below. Feel free to skip to 1:14 in, where the side-by-side test between the 32GB and 256GB iPhone 7’s starts.

Is this a big deal? I’d say, it’s worth keeping in mind if you are on the fence between the 32GB and 128GB iPhone 7.

UPDATE: Turns out this is standard for SSDs. Larger SSDs are faster because of parallel design. Here’s a link to a site that explains this pretty well (H/T Rob Pickering and Robert Davey).

Benjamin Mayo, writing for 9to5mac:

Prolific Apple hacker/developer Steve Troughton-Smith last night posted on Twitter that he has found a one-handed mode for the iPhone keyboard, hacking the iOS Simulator to demo the unreleased feature as shown above. The code has apparently been in the system since iOS 8 but is yet to be released as a public-facing feature.

The one-handed keyboard mode is activated by an edge swipe on the keys, revealing a sidebar of cut/copy/paste controls and squishing the other keys down to the side. This would make it much easier for the user to stretch their thumb across the entire width of the alphabet keys, improving one-handed use on larger iPhones.

Here’s a link to the Steve Troughton-Smith tweet that brought this to the surface.

I’m left-handed and I use a Plus. I’d love to test this keyboard.

Sui-Lee Wee, writing for The New York Times:

Zhang Sitong was saving a friend’s phone number on his Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphone when it started to vibrate and smoke. He threw it on the ground and told his friend to start filming.

Two employees from Samsung Electronics showed up at his house later that day, he said, offering a new Note 7 and about $900 in compensation on the condition that he keep the video private. Mr. Zhang angrily refused. Only weeks before, even as Samsung recalled more than two million Note 7s in the United States and elsewhere, the company had reassured him and other Chinese customers that the phone was safe.

And:

“They said there was no problem with the phones in China. That’s why I bought a Samsung,” said Mr. Zhang, a 23-year-old former firefighter. “This is an issue of deception. They are cheating Chinese consumers.”

And:

Samsung initially said the Chinese version of the Note 7 had a different battery and was safe. But last week, after reports in China of phones catching fire, it finally recalled the Note 7 there before it scrapped the phone globally.

Samsung was once the top phone maker in China. Now this. Wow.

Patently Apple:

Late yesterday Apple filed a trademark infringement cases against Mobile Star LLC for selling counterfeit power products such as power adapters and charging cables through Amazon.com. Apple believes these counterfeit products could lead to fires and are therefore a risk to the public.

Apple recently purchased a number of Apple power adapters and charging and syncing cables (collectively “power products”) that were directly sold by Amazon.com – not a third party seller – and determined that they were counterfeit. Amazon.com informed Apple that Mobile Star was its source for the majority of these counterfeit Apple products.

Apple’s internal examination and testing for these products revealed almost 90% of these products are counterfeit.

It’s understandable why people want to buy adapters and cables from third parties because the Apple-branded ones are ridiculously expensive. But, their quality is undoubtedly suspect which is why Apple wants them off the market.

Developer Camp is a three-day hackathon and community event, held regularly in cities all around the world. It relies on a certain pattern to create trust and foster cooperation — right up until the presentations begin. Our next event is all about bots.

This looks like a great event. The camp works with girls, boys, men, and women, so everyone has a chance to learn to code or hone your skills.

With only one touch, FabFocus uses advanced human recognition A.I. to detect people in the foreground, automatically blurring the background to create a professional-looking depth of field effect. Unique to FabFocus, the app enables multiple bokeh effects, transforming point lights into your choice of hexagons, stars, hearts and more!

The Loop sponsorship special— 33% off this week only. Get FabFocus Now.

The Verge:

For the better part of the last decade, one of the biggest demands from people in the market for a premium smartphone was a great camera. These days, though, it’s a feature you should expect. A good smartphone camera is no longer the deciding factor it once was if only because it’s now so common to find one in a high-end (or even mid-range) phone. These three phones are the perfect example of that. Google may have won the race this time around, but Samsung and Apple made it a photo finish.

Another shootout between the three most popular camera phones. Interesting to compare the Verge’s opinions with those of the CNET article I linked to yesterday.

Quartz:

Yekutiel Sherman couldn’t believe his eyes.

The Israeli entrepreneur had spent one year designing the product that would make him rich—a smartphone case that unfolds into a selfie stick. He had drawn up prototypes, secured some minimal funds from his family, and launched a crowdfunding campaign.

And:

One week after his product hit Kickstarter in December 2015, Sherman was shocked to see it for sale on AliExpress—Alibaba’s English-language wholesale site. Vendors across China were selling identical smartphone case selfie-sticks, using the same design Sherman came up with himself. Some of them were selling for as low as $10 a piece, well below Sherman’s expected retail price of £39 ($47.41). Amazingly, some of these vendors stole the name of Sherman’s product—Stikbox.

The perils of designing in public.

Jason Snell wrote this review of an app called Really Bad Chess. In a nutshell, it’s you against an AI, but with the chess pieces replaced, seemingly at random. So you might end up with 6 queens and only 1 pawn. Turns out the chess piece assignment is part of the Really Bad Chess handicapping process.

I downloaded the game and started playing. It is terrific fun, no matter your chess level.

Read the review, then go get the game (free with $2.99 in-app purchase to turn off ads).

Mike Wuerthele, writing for Apple Insider:

Rumors have been flying that Apple is considering teaming up with a company building customizable keyboards with individual E-ink keys, but the claims, including alleged “confirmations,” appear to spring from a single report that may be little more than self-promotion of an upcoming product.

This is in response to an article that appeared in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.

It’s all rumors until Apple actually announces it. But this October 27th Apple Mac event, that’s got to be real. It’s just got to be (I’ve got my sights set on a new MacBook Pro, that’s why).

Prashant Gopal, writing for Bloomberg:

Tap your phone, and AC/DC’s “Back in Black” blasts. Tap again, and the bath runs at a blissful 101 degrees. Sweet, right? Of course, your dad might view it as a bit over the top. All told, $30,000 worth of gadgets and gizmos were on display here, many run with Apple’s free HomeKit app.

And:

Apple is teaming up with a handful of builders and using these kinds of test beds to inch its way into the market for Internet-connected home furnishings, a nascent field that has attracted rivals like Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Amazon.com Inc.

At the core of this article is Apple’s strategy to bring your home into the Apple ecosystem. If you buy a home “wired” for HomeKit, you are more likely to move to iOS, buy an iPhone to control it all.

If I go down this road, will my house be worth less if I sell to an Android buyer? When I am looking for a house, will Android vs Brillo (Google’s Internet of Things platform) be part of the realtor’s pitch?

Ina Fried, writing for Recode:

Apple is planning to introduce new Macs at an Oct. 27 event, sources confirmed to Recode.

The move had long been expected, given that the company released MacOS Sierra last month but had yet to introduce any new computer models sporting the software. It also comes just in time for Apple to have the new products on sale for the full holiday season.

And:

The Mac event is expected to take place at or near Apple’s Cupertino campus rather than in San Francisco, where the company held many recent events, including the iPhone 7 announcement.

And, finally:

Apple declined to comment.

This was widely rumored, widely expected. It will be interesting to see if the new MacBook Pro ships without a headphone jack.

I suspect Apple will ship a lot of these.

The New York Times:

Pearl Jam, Tupac Shakur, Jane’s Addiction and Depeche Mode lead the latest crop of nominees for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, raising the possibility of a sweep of 1980s and ’90s nostalgia for an institution that has been criticized for its devotion to the baby boomer generation.

Of the 19 nominees announced by the Rock Hall on Tuesday, nine were getting their first nods, including Pearl Jam and Mr. Shakur in their first year of eligibility.

I love these stories if only for the arguments they generate. I think Pearl Jam and Tupac should be in the Hall but would disagree that Journey, the J. Geils Band, and Joe Tex deserve entry. What about you? Who do you think, out of the 19 nominees this round, deserves to be in or not?

Petapixel:

After setting up his tripod and pointing his camera at airport runways, Kelley spends hours photographing multiple exposures of every airplane that travels across his frame. Afterward, he spends many more hours selecting the best position for planes and combining a section of the photo set into one remarkable composite.

I’ve seen some of this artist’s work before and it is incredible the amount of time and skill this takes.

And according to one of its customer representatives, the Swedish music streaming company is not keen on going beyond its AirPlay support for Apple TV and coming out with its own Apple TV app soon.

This certainly isn’t because of anything Apple is doing to prevent Spotify from making an app—Pandora is on Apple TV, so it’s possible. I wonder if Spotify is just being childish here.

CNET:

This year, Google broke convention with its flagship phone by scrapping the old “Nexus” brand and calling it something new: Pixel. And while previous Nexus phones had decent cameras, Google says this Pixel has the best camera ever made on a smartphone.

But Google isn’t the only phone maker hyper-focused on photography this year. Apple’s new iPhone 7 Plus included, for the first time, a dual-camera system with optical zoom and a game-changing portrait mode.

So let’s compare the two cameras. I set out on a day-long photoshoot in California wine country, a scenic backdrop, perfect for pitting Pixel against the iPhone 7 Plus.

This is an interesting comparison. The reviewer uses the phones and takes the shots that an “average” person would take. This is not a “Review by a Pro” and therefore, might be even more applicable to our readers. Given the shots the reviewer used, I really don’t have very much argument with their conclusions.

Up for bid will be a slew of speakers and speaker boxes, more than half a dozen recording and live sound consoles, various vintage effects, analog and digital tape machines, guitars, drums and more. The full auction, “Property from the Estate of Frank and Gail Zappa,” will be held by Julien’s Auctions on November 4; the company will hold a public exhibition of the items October 31 through November 3.

His house was sold to Lady Gaga. There’s a lot of history in these items.

Netflix Inc’s shares jumped as much as 20 percent on Tuesday, after the company added 50 percent more subscribers than expected in the third quarter.

I love Netflix and use it all the time. It’s original programming is among some of the best out there these days. The fact they are increasing the investment in content is a good sign for customers.

The New York Times:

When you hear about surprise album releases these days, you probably think of Beyoncé, Frank Ocean, Kanye West.

Not Chuck Berry.

But Mr. Berry revealed a genuine surprise on Tuesday, his 90th birthday, when he announced that he would release a new record, “Chuck,” some time next year. It will be his first studio album since “Rock It” in 1979, and will come out on Dualtone Records, the label that has had one of the biggest indie hits in years with the Lumineers.

An announcement of “Chuck” had few details about the album other than that it would consist “primarily of new, original songs written, recorded and produced” by Mr. Berry, and that it was made in various studios in St. Louis, Mr. Berry’s hometown.

Berry is one of the founders of Rock and Roll with a tumultuous history and relationship with music. It will be really interesting to hear this album and what kind of music he has chosen to release as his last.

Quartz:

The best television characters have already been immortalized on screen, given reruns and our ability to stream our favorite episodes on demand. Now early research at University of Leeds is attempting to give these characters new life, by building digital recreations that can appear in new episodes or even take over for Siri on your smartphone.

Their first “immortal” character: Joey from Friends.

This is very smart and, I think, a real taste of the future. The key is to overcome the so-called uncanny valley. From Wikipedia:

The uncanny valley is the hypothesis that human replicas that appear almost, but not exactly, like real human beings elicit feelings of eeriness and revulsion among some observers.

On the dark side, once we can place actual characters in invented situations, a door will open that we can never close. You may find yourself, on video and unasked for, doing things you’ve never done. Elections will become even wilder.

All that said, this has been coming for a while now (read about the 2001 movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which promised to change everything, and really didn’t).

So take all this with a grain of salt and look forward to Joey from Friends setting your reminders. How you doin’?

Christian Zibreg, writing for iDownloadBlog:

Apple’s Photos app for the iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV includes a powerful yet underrated feature, called Memories, which scans your media library to unearth your cherished or forgotten events, trips and people such as a weekend hike, your baby’s first birthday, a year’s best photos and videos, etc.

Memories collates these items in gorgeous collections and even creates animated slideshows from them. In this tutorial, you will learn how to get started with Memories, create your own animated slideshows, customize them to your liking with photos, videos, music, titles and much more.

Good stuff. Well done.

The Verge:

Samsung is setting up Galaxy Note 7 exchange booths in airports around the world, hoping to stop customers taking the dangerous device onto flights at the last minute. The first of these new “customer service points” appear to have been introduced in South Korean airports, but Samsung has confirmed the booths are opening in airports across Australia, with reports of the desks appearing in the US as well.

The booths are located in “high-traffic terminals” before security screening, says Samsung, and allow Note 7 owners to swap their phone for an unspecified exchange device. According to a report from ABC7News in San Francisco — where a Samsung exchange desk has appeared at the city’s international airport — employees for the tech company are on hand to help customers transfer their data onto a new phone.

Crazy that this is necessary. I wonder what devices Samsung is offering in trade. If it’s an older Samsung device, there’s still the possibility the phone will be confiscated anyway, as there seems to be some confusion at airports on the name of the actual banned device.

And I somehow doubt Samsung is handing out iPhones, though that would be a great story.

Janet Morrissey, writing for The New York Times:

The comedian Dave Chappelle used to hate when fans would pull out smartphones during his act, record the performance and then post it on YouTube and social media before the show had even ended. To him, the fans seemed more interested in getting the perfect shot than in appreciating his stand-up routine.

But in late 2015, Mr. Chappelle discovered a technology called Yondr. Fans are required to place their cellphones into Yondr’s form-fitting lockable pouch when entering the show, and a disk mechanism unlocks it on the way out. Fans keep the pouch with them, but it is impossible for them to snap pictures, shoot videos or send text messages during the performance while the pouch is locked.

Read the article. A phone-free show is old school, in the best possible way.

Quartz:

Apple’s product launches are notoriously secretive, but the Cupertino, California tech giant is sure to do one thing ahead of a big reveal: file trademark paperwork in Jamaica.

It did this for Siri, the Apple Watch, macOS, and dozens of its major products months before the equivalent paperwork was lodged in the United States. Likewise, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft routinely file trademarks for their most important products in locales far flung from Silicon Valley and Seattle.

And:

The tech giants are exploiting a US trademark-law provision that lets them effectively claim a trademark in secret. Under this provision, once a mark is lodged with an intellectual property office outside the US, the firm has six months to file it with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). When the firm does file in the US, it can point to its original application made abroad to show that it has a priority claim on the mark.

Loopholes. Where would we be without them?

Fortune:

Ahrendts views the company’s newly redesigned retail outlets not just as stores, but as the company’s next big products…she and Apple view their stores as potential town squares within each of the cities they reside.“The store is now the biggest product we produce and we have five new features [for iPhones and iPads]. Accessories are avenues, and the huge digital screen in each store is the forum,” Ahrendts said.By the end of this year, 95 stores will be fully redesigned with this vision, the first of which were the San Francisco Union Square location and the London Regent Street outpost. International partners helped bring the concept to life—furniture makers, tech integrators, even marketing support from brands tied to the best no KYC crypto casinos, whose global reach made them early backers of the pilot stores. The community aspect to each store is key, Ahrendts said, with these town squares serving as educational centers.

An interesting metaphor. It’ll be interesting to see how this is implemented.

Also interesting:

There are nearly 500 Apple stores worldwide, and retail sales are responsible for some 18% of the company’s $233.7 billion in sales, amounting to $42 billion in yearly revenue.

That 18% number is impressive, given the relatively small number of stores per consumer in the world.