• Everything is very fast and responsive. Apps spring right open. Photos scroll without delay. Maps render without a hiccup. Everything is basically instantaneous, and it’s a joy.
• It’s all thanks to the A12 Bionic chip. Apple is so far ahead in mobile chips, it’s head-spinning. One benchmark shows the iPhone XS is faster than the new iMac Pro, a $5,000-plus pro workstation!

• For such big phone, it doesn’t feel too big. Having used an X all last year, and liking it, I thought the Max would be too big. But it doesn’t feel as big as the old Plus iPhones used to
• iPhone XS Max camera

• Especially the new Portrait mode with advanced bokeh and Depth Control. The Max is less a phone, and more an advanced, near-DSLR camera with a cellular connection.

• The screen is so big and clear, there’s no need to take your laptop or iPad on flights any more. The Max will do nicely.

• Despite dropping my old iPhone X numerous times, it has just a few scuffs and no cracked screen (it was, however, often in a case). But this time, because the Max is so thin, I’m going to try it caseless for a while. I’d like to enjoy Apple’s design for a change, without a bulky wrapping. (I know; I may regret this later.)

• The iPhone XS and its front-facing camera are supposed to help its owners make better self-portraits. However, some think their iPhone selfies look better than they should
• Lewis Helsenteger, aka Unboxing Therapy, is calling it beautygate
• Users are taking to internet forums like Reddit to question whether Apple added an undisclosed beauty filter to the front-facing camera on the iPhone XS and XS Max. Some are even posting side-by-side selfies taken with an XS and older handset to make a case that the newest iPhone has more than deeper pixels and an improved portrait mode going for it.

• Analysis firm TechInsights did a teardown of the an iPhone XS Max with 256GB of storage. That’s reportedly the most popular version of Apple’s best selling handset.
• As part of its teardown, TechInsights estimated the cost for each component. The total? $443
• Compared to the $1249 price tag for the product. So just 35 percent of the purchase price goes to pay for the actual hardware.
• Of course, the remaining $806 isn’t pure profit. The bill of materials (BoM) doesn’t cover Apple’s employee salaries, advertising, and other costs. Also, the BoM doesn’t include software, and iPhone and iPad sales have to cover the cost of developing iOS and its bundled software.

• Early reviews for the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max have already come in and while most of the people that have tested the new device are impresssed, this years models aren’t as big a leap as the iPhone X.

• Panzarino for Techrunch: “As far as Face ID goes, there has been no perceivable difference for me in speed or number of positives… There is also supposed to be improvements in off-angle recognition of your face, say when lying down or when your phone is flat on a desk. I tried a lot of different positions here and could never really definitively say that iPhone XS was better in this regardit… it very likely takes training time to get it near the confidence levels that my iPhone X has stored away.”

• Nilay Patel for The Verge: "I got a full 12 hours of battery life out of the XS Max without low power mode, and that’s even under my heavy daily use.   The smaller XS is rated to get 30 minutes more than the X, which has run for about 8 hours for me this past year. It’s solid."

• NYT: "The XS Max screen was so good-looking that I wanted to keep reading articles and looking at photos on Instagram. When I used Apple’s new Screen Time feature to monitor my use of each device, I discovered that I spent an average of roughly five and a half hours a day on the XS Max, two hours more than on the XS.”

• “On the test Verizon account I used, iPhone XS delivers. I got download speeds of 250 Mbps in New Jersey, versus 170 Mbps using the same SIM in the iPhone X.

• In his comprehensive review of the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max, John Gruber reveals that Apple made the camera sensor 32% larger. After noticing that the wide-angle lens on the iPhone XS is 2mm wider than the one on the iPhone X, Gruber also discovered the lens is longer too.
• A bigger sensor and longer lens don’t sound like a big deal, but it required some crafty design work to pull it off without making the iPhone a bloated
• Another impressive feature on the iPhone XS camera is its ability to adapt to low-light on the fly. If you’re shooting video at 30FPS, there’s an option to enable “Auto Low Light FPS.” The feature will drop the framerate to 24 FPS when it detects that there’s not enough light to get a good exposure

• It’s definitely a nice phone, but if you have an X, it’s not worth upgrading

• The indedpent called the series 4 watch “Astonishingly good”!
• The Verge and the NYT both raved about how great the new larger display looked.  Particularly with the rounded corners, and made it much more apt to looking at photos and using apps.
• The Watch felt snappier than the gen 3, but The Verge noted that the imrpovement wasn’t as drastic as Gen 2 to Gen 3.

• Wired's Rosenfield came away impressed by the accuracy of the watch's new optical heart-rate sensor as well as the automatic workout detection, while noting that "runners will love the new rolling mile measurement, cadence, and target pace notifications.”
• Both The Verge and iMore commented about how much louder the speaker is, saying it was much easier to hear calls.  Callers also noted they couldn’t really tell they were being rung from an Apple Watch.
• No one has been able to test the ECG feature yet since it won’t be enabled until later this year.

• TechCrunch's Heater took particular liking to the watch's new haptic Digital Crown, which "feels like turning a mechanical dial."

• FOMO: anxiety that an exciting or interesting event may currently be happening elsewhere, often aroused by posts seen on a social media website.
• The new Walkie-Talkie app is being lauded by Apple Watch owners as the best new feature that came out as part of watchOS 5. But for some wearers there’s a serious problem: they can’t find anyone to talk to.  
• Walkie-Talkie gives wearers the ability to turn their wrist into a sort of digital two-way radio transceiver with other Apple Watch wearers. It’s a super-convenient way to have short bursts of conversation when you don’t want to talk on the phone. If you don’t have any friends with an Apple WAtch though then there’s no way to get in on the action.

• Apple released the first beta of iOS 12.1 today. Developer Guilherme Rambo went digging around in the code and turned up a mention of “iPad2018Fall.” Sometimes references to upcoming devices hidden in iOS betas are obscure, but not this time
• He also found a glyph of the iPad that showed it will have FaceId, but will not have a notch.
• While digging into the simulator for iOS 12.1, Steve Troughton-Smith discovered that Apple has added support for virtualized 4K external displays. That’s a big deal for two reasons: 1) It means you’re going to be able to hook up iPads to 4K monitors, 2) It’s not currently possible to do that through the Lightning HDMI adapter

With over a hundred thousand attendees, the Penny Arcade Expo is one of the largest video game conventions in the world, and it all started in Seattle, Washington.

Hot off the heels of PAX 2018, Erfon sits across his good friend, The Amazing Aaron Hughes, to discuss the state of Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo, their favorite games and spectacles from the event, and how FORNITE and PUBG have changed the face of gaming.  

• Apple’s marketing team has reportedly been considering losing the Plus suffix that has been used on the largest models since the iPhone 6 Plus came out in 2014
• We’ve already head reports that Apple is going to ditch the “Plus” description for its larger iPhones. Now there’s word that the replacement term could be “Max.”
• If true, this means that the company will announce a week from today the iPhone Xs with a 5.8-inch display and the iPhone Xs Max with a 6.5-inch one.

• With most of the specifications of the 2018 iPhones already known, the largest remaining question is price.
• A report from the German website Macerkoff, who starts by pointing out that the iPhone 8 costs €799, the iPhone 8 Plus sells for €909, and the iPhone X is €1149.
• Citing two different sources, the site says the 6.1-inch LCD iPhone expected to be announced next week will cost €799, the 5.8-inch replacement for the iPhone X will be €909, and the 6.5-inch OLED device sell for €1149.
• If that assumption is correct, the 6.1-inch LCD iPhone will be $699,  the speed-bumped 5.8-inch iPhone X will be $799, and the the 6.5-inch OLED model will be $999.

• Apple is developing an always-on display mode for Apple Watch, a new patent application reveals.
• The feature would give users the ability to see the time — and possibly other information — without having to raise their wrist every time. But Apple wants to make sure OLED burn-in doesn’t become a problem.
• There are several reasons for that, such as its impact on battery life and the risk that the feature could ruin Apple Watch’s OLED display.

• When Steve Jobs died in 2011, pundits wondered how the company would continue to make great products without him.
• The question is partly answered by programmer Ken Kocienda’s new book, Creative Selection, which describes his 15 years working at Apple helping to develop the original iPhone, iPad and Safari web browser.