An iPhone 8 Plus, in the U.S., with 256 GB of storage goes for US$949. But the that’s the lowest price you’ll pay. Here’s an interesting chart that show how much it’ll cost in many other countries, in equivalent U.S. dollar.s. For example, those in Brazil will pay the equivalent of $1377.  Why? Import taxes.

Actress Rosey Blair and her husband were on a plane recently, and they live tweeted a «love story» between passengers sitting in front of them. It was rife with photos and details to her followers, and many saw it as an invasion of privacy where the people didn’t consent.

Of course, the sexual implication is something [the man is] praised for, while the woman is attacked…There’s another unfortunate dimension to this whole saga that mimics the coercive effect of public marriage proposals: everyone innocently cheers on the romance because it tells a good story, but it places the woman in the invidious position of being the “bad guy” if she says no.

Leif Johnson writes how the App Store changed his life.

All the recent talk about the App Store’s 10th anniversary makes me wonder if I’d have finished it if I had access to the same apps I now enjoy on my iPhone and my iPad. That sometimes makes the frustrations feels almost fun. Discussions of the App Store’s impact tend to focus on how it gave thousands of small-time developers a good way to make money or how it changed our social lives; we give relatively little attention to how it simplified our routines. I don’t think I’d be the same person I am today without it. Heck, I’ll bet the same could be said about you.

Writing for Macworld, Dan Moren wants Apple products to be colorful again. Apple products like the iPhone and IPad come in metallic colors like silver, gray, and gold, but they aren’t as colorful as the products of old with the six colors of the old Apple logo.

The recent chromatic identity of Apple has clearly been one of simplicity and elegance. From the featureless white room in which Jony Ive seems to give all his product spiels to the non-illuminating Apple logo on the latest notebook computers, the company’s design over the past decade and change has often seemed to treat colors as frivolous and silly. Even that six-color Apple logo, long the distinctive badge of the company, was retired in 1998; for the last 15 years or so, it’s merely been a monochromatic silhouette.

China is running headstrong in to surveillance with facial recognition and is already using the technology to identify and arrest criminal suspects. Right now the country is experimenting with facial recognition glasses police can wear to look for potential arrest targets. It’s pretty creepy and growing by leaps and bounds with China expected to have some 300 million cameras installed by 2020. Philip Elmer-DeWitt says on his Apple 3.0 blog that the iPhone and iPad maker is getting in on the game, too. He says:

I’m told by an analyst who tracks headgear technology that Apple is three to five years away from a marketable product. It sounds like the Chinese, unhampered by any privacy concerns—in fact, incentivized to surveil—may get there first.