Dear Friends,

Grace made an apple pie from the apples from our trees in the yard the other night. We can grow just about anything pretty well, but getting apples has always been a challenge for us. Usually they are misshapen or fall from the tree early or are the victim of a late spring frost. This year, we have quite a few and if my arctic kiwi plant doesn’t climb all over them, we might get a few pies this year.

The weather has definitely been fall-like with some cool weather followed by stormy, hot and humid weather. You can see the tinges of the trees beginning to change with an occasional bright red maple. Flocks of Canada geese are flying in formation southward, so fall is really here.

So if it is fall, it must be Apple announcement season and we had the introduction of two new iPhones this week. The iPhone 5C with its colorful plastic body is basically the iPhone 5 in a new colorful plastic case. It is the $99 entry-level iPhone now with the iPhone 4S being retained as the “free” iPhone when you sign up for a 2-year contract. The other big announcement was the iPhone 5S with some big advances in technology — the processors and the new Touch ID, which is the biometric fingerprint sensor.

Fingerprint sensors are nothing new, but fingerprint sensors that actually work in an everyday environment are new. I bought a biometric lock for my house some years ago and thought I was really cool until I discovered (much to Grace’s glee) that it only worked occasionally and resulted in us being locked out of our house a couple of the very few times we lock our house. The fingerprint sensor on the iPhone is reportedly the first that really works reliably.

Touch ID will work to unlock your iPhone 5S but also to authenticate your Apple ID for the iTunes or App stores, making it a foray into electronic payments, too. I’ll give a first hand (finger) report as soon as we have the iPhone 5S to test. The processor is the new A7, which by itself, is a breakthrough in speed and the first 64-bit processor in a smartphone. But there is a co-processor as well — the M7 that will take the load off of the A7 by handling all the “motion” activities such as gyroscope, accelerometer, compass and other sensor and uses a lot less power while doing it. With the M7 feeding information to the iPhone 5, there are a number of specialized fitness apps that can be envisioned.

I have been playing with iOS 7 for awhile as part of the Apple Developers program, and it is a big advancement over the competition and iOS 6. I think you are going to really like the new iPhones — colorful form factors, greater speed, battery-saving features and the convenience of iOS 7!