Dear Friends,

Grace and I had a great trip to Chicago to watch a couple of Cubs games. Unfortunately, the Cubbies forgot how to hit the ball, so after leading the division for weeks, they choked and ended up losing both the tie-breaker against Milwaukee and the Wild Card game versus the Rockies. You can’t win in baseball if you can’t hit!

We were the country bumpkins in the big city, but Chicago being our home town where we met many moons ago made us very comfortable. We took the blue line from the airport to our hotel downtown. I mention this because one of the killer apps for the Apple Watch was its ability to wirelessly pay for the subway at the turnstile by putting our Apple Watch next to the reader. This came in really handy after the Cubs game when the Addison “L” stop is one huge mass of people trying to get to the trains. Many were lining up at the fare machines to buy a ticket, but we were able to just cut to the front of the line and wave our Apple Watches at the turn style to get on the train.

It is always fun to go to Chicago. There are so many memories for Grace and I since we used to date by riding the L or going to O’Hare and meet random incoming flights. Did I mention that Chicago pizza is the best?

This week’s Kibbles & Bytes exclusive features the MacBook Pro 15-inch with TouchBar. This is a special configure-to-order machine that has the 3.1 GHz i7 processor, 16GB of ram, a huge 2 TB SSD drive and 4GB of video ram. This is a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro 15-inch that was discontinued in July. I was able to buy 3 brand new units and now offer them to Kibbles & Bytes readers on a first come, first served basis. This week we bundle them with AppleCare Plus and still offer them at over $1000 below their original bundled price of $4579. These units will be in early next week and are $3319.99 with AppleCare +.