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It was discovered by Larry Salibra and others that Apple has been disabling its Apple News Service in China. Perhaps most troubling is how Apple is doing this:

They’re censoring news content that I downloaded and stored on my device purchased in the USA, before I even enter China just because my phone happens to connect to a Chinese signal floating over the border. On device censorship is much different than having your server blocked by the Great Firewall or not enabling a feature for customers with certain country iTunes account. That Apple has little choice doesn’t make it any less creepy or outrageous.

The New York Times reports that Apple confirmed, off the record, that it is indeed turning off Apple News in Mainland China.

Apple has disabled its news app in China, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation, the most recent sign of how difficult it can be for foreign companies to manage the strict rules governing media and online expression there. Customers who already downloaded the app by registering their phones in the United States can still see content in it when they travel overseas — but they have found that it does not work in China. Those in China who look at the top of the Apple News feed, which would normally display a list of selected articles based on a user’s preferred media, instead see an error message: “Can’t refresh right now. News isn’t supported in your current region.”

China is Apple’s most promising market but unfortunately it is controlled by a government that wields total control over information and the media. Simply removing the news App might be better than running afoul of Beijing.  Google famously ran afoul of the Chinese government in 2010 after sustaining a state-sponsored hacking attack on its Windows computers and was effectively kicked out of the country. Only in the past few months have attempts been made to mend the bridges.  Apple certainly doesn’t want to hurt its cash cow over censorship. From a PR perspective, it probably doesn’t want to hand the reigns over to Beijing either.

I don’t expect this to change soon. 

Apple, as is usually the case in matters like this, hasn’t responded to request for comment.

Filed under: AAPL Company

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If you’ve ever tried to charge your iPhones/iPads/etc. directly from a small solar panel you probably know it is pretty difficult. Even with direct sunlight, you aren’t likely to be able to charge the device reliably. Most USB-charged devices require a minimum of 5W (5Vx1A) of continuous power to even register a charge. Then a cloud comes or the sun moves and you aren’t charging anymore.

Adding a battery to the mix helps, especially if the battery is big and can charge the device on its own without any sun. But most of the solar/battery combos fall into 2 categories: Either messy because they are a bulky 2 step solution or the solar panel is too small to make a meaningful charge and you are mostly using it like a regular USB battery.

SolarTab is a break of fresh air here. It is a relatively big 5.5W solar panel built on a thin 13,000mAh battery enclosure that fits in an included Moleskine-esque case. Size-wise, think the original iPad with a nice leather case and a huge solar panel instead of a screen…

This is the perfect large battery for a number of reasons. Because it is so thin, it fits like a book (or iPad!) in a backpack, briefcase or large purse. Most importantly, it always has power. I leave mine on my windowsill  for when I need to go into the city (usually 1-2 times per week). My iPhone and iPad usually die with heavy use so it’s a lifesaver for my trips home. What’s great is that I don’t ever have to plug it in. A few days in the window will have me back to full for my next trip.

This is a premium product with a Apple-inspired 4-LED battery indicator and solar charging indicator. It will charge a dead iPhone or more times to full. An iPad at least twice.

What’s perfect about the size is that the solar panel in direct sunlight can charge an iPhone or iPad by itself (5Vx1A speed) but you shouldn’t ever need this with the monster 13,000mAh battery. There are 2 separate USB out ports which each give you a relatively powerful 2.1A x 5 V or 11 Watts.  If you need to add charge manually you can do so via Micro-USB.

What’s more, with a USBA to USB-C cable, you can power (but not charge) the new MacBooks or a Chrome Pixel for about double their normal battery life. If the MacBook is asleep then you can charge the internal battery. It would be nice if on a future version the USB ports could support the 2.4A for the fastest speed on current iPads and more for the MacBook.

Overall, I’m very satisfied with the SolarTab. It really nails the solar-battery USB charger unlike any other product I’ve used before. You can pick one up at Amazon with $20 off coupon code 9TO5SLTB ($109 total) at Amazon or for $119 at SolarTab direct.

Other products to consider here from (9to59oys.com):

• Aukey 20W Solar Charger with Dual USB Port $40 w/code 7HP5VBL4 (Orig. $50) 
• KMASHI 10,000mAh External Battery Power Bank $9.29 w/code YTI7MT89
• Aukey Car Jump Starter and Portable External Battery w/12V Output and 400A Peak Current $50 w/code EAP8LOB2 (Orig. $70) | Amazon

Filed under: AAPL Company, Reviews Tagged: battery, iPad, Lightning connector, solar, Solartab

For more news on AAPL Company, iPad, and Reviews continue reading at 9to5Mac.

What do you think? Discuss “Solartab, the premium solar charger/battery for iPad and iPhone that actually works” with our community.

Yet another leak has shown up of the rumored HTC One ‘Aero’, also known as the One A9. Although it’s shown up a few times in the past, never has it been clearer as to where the design influences have come from. HTC is expected to officially unveil the smartphone during a virtual event on October 20. Today’s leak comes via Steve Hemmerstoffer (aka @OnLeaks) and shows the extent to which HTC has gone to be ‘inspired’ by the iPhone 6/6s..

Previously, we’ve seen the device in six color variants, and this seems to be the ‘carbon gray’ (read: Space Gray) version of the smartphone. As we’ve seen before, the phone has an all-metal body with antenna bands running along the top and the bottom on the rear panel. The metal is slightly curved around the edges, while the four corners are rounded, presumably to give it a more comfortable feel in hand and a more ‘friendly’ appearance.

On the right edge, there’s a long volume rocker sitting above a heavily textured power button, while on the other side there are two removable, metal trays: one for a microSD card, the other for a SIM card. The bottom edge, much like the iPhone 6/6s, features a handful of machined holes for the speaker, a 3.5mm jack and the microphone as well as a non-centered Micro USB port. Also like the iPhone, the rear camera is housed in a slightly protruding metal ring on the back.

Apart from the slightly different shapes and placements of the ports and holes, it’s about as close to being an iPhone 6 as anything we’ve seen on the Android market that isn’t a cheap Chinese clone. The camera is centered, rather than being placed in left corner. The home button is pill-shaped, not round, and the speaker grille holes are more square. While HTC could argue that Apple doesn’t own the trademark for metal rectangles with rounded corners and edges, it’s hard to ignore the aesthetic similarities. It can be thankful it agreed a 10-year legal truce deal with Apple, otherwise it might have found itself on the wrong end of an expensive lawsuit.

Perhaps the one major difference is the top edge which is dominated by a large black panel, presumably placed there to act as a ‘window’ for an IR blaster, much like the dark plastic panel on the top edge of the HTC One M8 and M9. What’s interesting to note with this device, from what we’ve seen so far, is that there doesn’t appear to be any front-facing speakers, unlike virtually every other HTC phone currently on the market.

HTC has come under a lot of financial strain recently, and is releasing the A9 to help gain popularity again. While it may look like the iPhone from the outside, it won’t be priced like one. It’s rumored to be a mid-range device with pricing to match. It will be unveiled at an event on October 20, at which point we’ll found out exactly how similar this is to Apple’s own flagship smartphone.

Filed under: Tech Industry Tagged: Android, Apple, copy, HTC, htc one a9, iphone clone, lawsuits, leaks

For more information about Apple, Tech Industry, and Android continue reading at 9to5Mac.

What do you think? Discuss “HTC One A9 dummy leak gives our best look yet at the unreleased iPhone copy” with our community.

Great photographers are made, not born, and even the best photographers have plenty of unimpressive shots in their collections. But in the age of digital photography, it’s possible to create a great photograph without being a great photographer. You can even accomplish this days after snapping your photo, so long as you have the right post-processing software and a little time to play around.

Macphun’s Creative Kit 2016 ($90) provides photographers of all skill levels with six different tools that make bland or imperfect photos look great. This year’s Creative Kit includes the Pro versions of Macphun’s Focus, FX Photo Studio, Intensify, Noiseless, Snapheal, and Tonality, each renamed “CK” and expanded with extra features. All six of the apps are designed to be super easy to use, yielding great results even without diving into the manual controls, though there are rewards for tweaking their settings. Better yet, the standalone apps now work as plug-ins for OS X Photos, Aperture, Photoshop, and Lightroom, and can easily be used in combination with one another for even more powerful editing…

The six Creative Kit 2016 apps arrive as a single download with one installer. This is how the basic and Pro versions are regularly priced — bear in mind that Creative Kit 2016’s “CK” versions are all better than their “Pro” predecessors.

• Focus: $10 basic, $50 Pro
• FX Photo Studio: $15 basic, $25 Pro
• Intensify: $15 basic, $60 Pro
• Noiseless: $15 basic, $60 Pro
• Snapheal: $15 basic, $50 Pro
• Tonality: $18 basic, $70 Pro

Do the math and you’ll wind up with a cost of $88 just to get the basic versions of all six apps, versus $315 for all six Pro versions. The pre-order price of $90 gives you upgraded versions of all six Pro apps for only $2 more than you’d pay for all six basic apps; after October 14, the regular $150 price is less than half the cost of buying the six Pro apps separately. If you’re thinking of buying just two or three Pro apps, Macphun is effectively encouraging you to grab the whole Creative Kit instead. And that’s frankly a pretty good idea.

How do Creative Kit 2016’s Pro/CK versions differ from the basic ones? Each app varies, but they generally include plug-in support for Adobe and Apple photo editing apps, a collection of meaningfully better photo processing engines, batch processing capabilities, and some brand-new, CK-exclusive presets and filters.

Here’s what you can expect from each of the Creative Kit 2016 apps:

Focus CK

The point of Focus CK is simple: use post-processing software to mimic the depth-of-field effects offered by excellent lenses. Focus lets you choose an area of sharpness, then surrounds it with your choice of circular or linear bands of softness that create depth-of-field-like blurring. Presets enable you to quickly achieve appropriate “focus” for portrait, nature, architecture, macro, and tilt-shift photographs, while manual controls let you independently change the sharpness, brightness, and colors of blurred and focused areas. Beyond the speed and simplicity Focus CK offers, the power of its results — particularly tilt-shift-like blurs and saturation — is seriously striking, and masking tools give you pixel-level control over the effects if you want it.

FX Photo Studio CK

Macphun’s best-known app is also its most broadly-featured one: FX Photo Studio originated on iOS as a more powerful alternative to Instagram-style photo filters, and now possess an incredible array of over 200 filters and frames. The basic concept — use color-shifting, overlays, and underlays to make a simple photo “pop” — now has hundreds of possible permutations, injecting subtle or powerful colors and shapes into images. A single click on a preset is enough to make a dull image explode with improvements, while simple or full manual sliders let you fine-tune the effects. FX Photo Studio CK includes RAW support, as well.

Intensify CK

Intensify’s core functionality seems simpler than it is. Using presets (or your choice of manual histograms and sliders), it enables you to use colors and sharpening tools to reveal muted or hidden details in photographs — a great feature if you’re using a camera that produces sharp but flat-looking images. The results you’ll get from Intensify will depend on whether you’re trying to subtly enhance certain colors or really bring out buried elements in a picture, but the micro-sharpening, editing, and color adjustment tools go beyond what you’d find in basic photo editors such as OS X Photos. Macphun pitches Intensify as a way to recover the full dynamic range of photos lost when skies get blown out or shadows make things too murky, and it actually works.

Noiseless CK

I’ve reviewed the standalone version of Noiseless in greater detail here, and it’s a truly great app: using your choice of a bunch of presets, you can instantly reduce grain and blocky noise in images, preserving much (if not most) of the original image’s sharpness at the same time. While I’ve seen some debate amongst serious photographers as to how the app’s noise reduction compares against standalone apps costing twice as much as the entire Creative Kit 2016 package, I’ve achieved excellent results with only a few minutes worth of tweaking even when I start with deliberately miserable-looking photos, such as the one above, which was severely underexposed and had tons of noise to eliminate. Noiseless is one of my most-used Macphun apps, and will likely be one of yours, too.

Snapheal CK

I knew nothing about Snapheal before testing the Creative Kit 2016, but was amazed to see how well it worked for its single task: effortlessly erasing things from photos. Doing nothing more than using the cursor to highlight objects I wanted to remove, then hitting a large “erase” button, I watched as a doorknob disappeared perfectly — replaced by a regular length of door — then repeated the same trick to delete a plant in the background. Then I only had to tick one box (“local” rather than “global”) to near-perfectly remove panels from the door; I show the slightly imperfect (but easily corrected) result above. Snapheal accomplishes each of its erasures by analyzing the area to be scrubbed against either the whole of the image or the area immediately around it, operating as a super-smart healing brush. Even as a fan of Photoshop’s healing and content-aware filling tools, I was impressed by how well Snapheal worked with minimal user intervention.

Tonality CK

Like Noiseless, I reviewed the standalone version of Tonality here, and found it to be an awesome tool: Tonality turns full-color images into astonishingly beautiful grayscale/black-and-white photos, or similarly limited-tone sepia, blue, or other variants. Once again, the app’s focus is deliberately circumscribed to do just one thing very well, letting you use a large collection of presets to choose the way you want your image to look. If you thought there was only one way to make a black-and-white photo, Tonality will quickly change your mind, as it creates highly stylized renditions that could as easily appear in old-time newspapers as in modern art collections.

Creative Kit 2016: Is It Worthwhile?

As much as I enjoy composing photos that look really great without any post-processing, I’ve learned to appreciate the extra value that photo editing tools can provide. The Creative Kit 2016 lets you re-visit old images, making them look better than they did when you took them. As a package, it strikes me as a superb value at its pre-order asking price: even individual tools can produce results that range from dreamy to hyper-detailed to subtle or punchy based on your preferences and mood. And when you use two or more tools together, you can produce even more amazing results — akin to the output of a more expensive camera — as demonstrated by the series below.

Click to view slideshow.

I wanted to see whether I could use Creative Kit 2016 and an iPhone camera to replicate an image snapped with a $2,500 DSLR and $1,800 lens — with only 5 minutes of editing time. So I used both cameras to take roughly the same picture, then loaded Focus CK to replicate the DSLR’s depth-of-field. Using the app’s mask brush and eraser, I was able to easily draw atop the area I wanted to keep in focus, then use sliders to choose the amount of blurring, saturation, and blowing out of highlights I wanted to achieve for the background. Then, with only 1 minute to make level adjustments in Intensify CK (below), I was able to bring the iPhone image’s colors much closer to the DSLR’s originals. You can click on the full-sized images above to compare them.

Having shot digital photographs for over 15 years (and used photo editing software for at least that long), the highest praise I can give Creative Kit is that the six tools here routinely achieve different and better results than premium photo apps I’ve relied upon, including Photoshop and Aperture. Whether you’re a decent photographer looking to become good, a good photographer hoping to become great, or a great photographer wanting to create something iconic, Creative Kit 2016 will certainly have something for your needs. It’s a great investment in your past, present, and future photography.

More From This Author

Check out more of my How-To guides and reviews for 9to5Mac here! In recent months, I published a guide to turning your digital photos into beautiful wall art (see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3), as well as a lot of different topics of interest to Mac, iPad, iPhone, iPod, Apple TV, and Apple Watch users.

Filed under: General, Mac, Reviews Tagged: Creative Kit, Creative Kit 2016, editing, Macphun, photography, post-processing

For more news on Mac, Reviews, and General continue reading at 9to5Mac.

What do you think? Discuss “Review: Macphun’s Creative Kit 2016 makes boring photos beautiful, for a modest price” with our community.

Yesterday we reported on comments made by Tesla CEO Elon Musk during a recent interview with German newspaper Handelsblatt. The CEO, known for speaking his mind candidly on occasions, made comments that could easily have been interpreted as critical to the design of the Apple Watch and the quality of the company’s hires from Tesla, but Friday afternoon Musk took to Twitter to soften those comments.

His initial comments were in reference to the so-called “poaching war” between Tesla and Apple over automotive engineers. “They have hired people we’ve fired,” Musk said. “We always jokingly call Apple the ‘Tesla Graveyard.’ If you don’t make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple.”

Musk then briefly explained why he is not worried about Apple entering the electric vehicle industry:

Did you ever take a look at the Apple Watch? (laughs) No, seriously: It’s good that Apple is moving and investing in this direction. But cars are very complex compared to phones or smartwatches. You can’t just go to a supplier like Foxconn and say: Build me a car.

These comments were made last month during Musk’s visit in Europe, but U.S. media only picked up the comments yesterday and the CEO took to Twitter Friday afternoon to clarify:

Yo, I don't hate Apple. It's a great company with a lot of talented people. I love their products and I'm glad they're doing an EV.

—
Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 09, 2015

These comments shouldn’t come as a surprise since Musk has been vocal in the past about hoping for Apple to enter the auto industry with an electric car.

Regarding the watch, Jony & his team created a beautiful design, but the functionality isn't compelling yet. By version 3, it will be.

—
Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 09, 2015

Musk mentioned Apple’s Chief Design Officer by name to congratulate him and his team on the design of the watch. Coincidentally both executives were at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit earlier this week. Ive shared the stage with director J.J. Abrams, while Musk had a discussion with Y Combinator President Sam Altman moderated by New York Times and CNBC contributor Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Filed under: AAPL Company Tagged: Apple Watch comments, Elon Musk, Tesla Motors, Tesla poaching

For more news on AAPL Company, Tesla Motors, and Elon Musk continue reading at 9to5Mac.

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Google first introduced app indexing for iOS apps in search back in May, allowing in-app content to appear in search results with links that send users directly to an app. The feature was originally only available in the Google app and Chrome browser, but now Google is launching an updated version of the framework that will make the app links also appear in Google search results in Safari.

Getting your app content found on Google just got easier. App Indexing is now compatible with HTTP deep link standards for iOS 9, as it has been on Android from the beginning. That means that you can start getting your app content into the Search results page on Safari in iOS, simply by adding Universal Links to your iOS app, then integrating with our SDK.

Developers simply need to support the Universal Links standard to get their apps to show up in search results. Users will begin to see the app indexing links showing up in Safari on iOS by the end October.

Devs can read more on how to support the feature here.

Filed under: Apps Tagged: app indexing, Apple, deep-linking, Google, iOS 9, Safari, search

For more information about Apple, Apps, and Google continue reading at 9to5Mac.

What do you think? Discuss “Google’s app indexing links coming to Safari on iOS by end of month” with our community.

Apple has used its YouTube channel for debuting new ads and sharing other marketing videos for years now, and today the company has expanded into four more countries (via @setteBIT) with localized versions of their latest videos. Official Apple YouTube channels in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain are now available with localized videos showcasing Apple’s latest products including iPhone 6s and Apple Watch as well as iPad Pro and Apple Music. The new channels follow a similar move in South Korea and Japan a couple months ago. You can find all Apple’s various YouTube channels here. Videos from around the world follow:

France

Germany

Italy

Spain

Filed under: AAPL Company, Apple Music, Apple TV, Apple Watch, General, iOS, iOS Devices Tagged: Apple, YouTube

For more information about AAPL Company, iOS Devices, and Apple continue reading at 9to5Mac.

What do you think? Discuss “Apple expands localized YouTube channels to France, Germany, Italy, & Spain” with our community.

When Apple introduced the iPhone 6s at its September 9th special event, it billed the new model as the “best phone for traveling around the world,” thanks largely to support for “23 bands of LTE wireless networking.” But that day, the new iPhone’s tech specs page told a more complex story: Apple advertised a seemingly U.S. and Puerto Rico-specific A1633 iPhone 6s with 23 LTE bands (including AT&T’s exclusive band 30) but no CDMA support, while Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, and every international carrier outside China got an A1688 iPhone 6s with 22 LTE bands and CDMA support. Clearly, the “best phone for traveling around the world” would be the international A1688 version, right?

Wrong. This week, Apple started selling a SIM-free, unlocked iPhone that works with “any supported carrier worldwide, such as AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, or Sprint in the United States.” Hidden inside a text link titled “Learn more about the SIM-free iPhone,” Apple notes that the SIM-free iPhone 6s is model A1633 — the AT&T version, not the one sold internationally. How could this make sense?…

Archive.org’s Wayback Machine confirms that Apple changed the iPhone 6s tech specs page (shown below) at some point after the September 9th event to note that the A1633 model actually does have CDMA support after all. On the A1633 (and iPhone 6s Plus model A1634), the line noting CDMA EV-DO Rev. A now appears below the UMTS line, with the same supported frequencies as the A1687 and A1688 models below.

In other words, if you bought a Verizon, T-Mobile, or Sprint iPhone 6s thinking that you were getting Apple’s best worldphone, too bad. The updated tech specs page suggests AT&T’s version has all the same features, plus an extra LTE band for improved performance on AT&T’s network, which means the A1633 should deliver optimal performance on any U.S. or international carrier outside of China. Also interesting: Apple’s pages differentiate between A1688 (GSM) and A1688 (CDMA), hinting that there may be software or other locks on the Verizon/Sprint and T-Mobile/international GSM phones, while no such distinction is made for the A1633.

Apple’s international customers may be in for a different surprise. The FAQ question “can I use my iPhone outside my home country?” on Apple’s UK iPhone 6s pages suggests that international SIM-free/unlocked iPhone 6s customers may be getting a GSM-only version of the A1687, which mightn’t work on CDMA networks. “iPhone is enabled to work on networks using GSM around the world,” says the FAQ. “Because the iPhone sold by apple.com is unlocked, you can purchase a SIM card and service from a local carrier at your destination.”

Who will be affected by this? If you’re a Verizon, T-Mobile, or Sprint customer who bought an iPhone 6s or 6s Plus with thoughts of possibly switching to AT&T, you don’t have the best phone to take advantage of AT&T’s network — and may want to get a SIM-free phone instead. But if you’re an AT&T customer who worried about using your phone on a CDMA network, you may be in better shape when switching carriers than you’d originally expected.

We’ve reached out to Apple for clarification on the differences between the phones, and will update this article if/when we hear back.

Filed under: AAPL Company, iOS Devices Tagged: AT&T, iPhone 6s, Travel, unlocked, world phone

Visit 9to5Mac to find more special coverage of AAPL Company, iOS Devices, and AT&T.

What do you think? Discuss “PSA: Apple’s iPhone 6s CDMA spec change makes AT&T’s model its best worldphone” with our community.

Changes to Apple’s published tech specs for various products are rare, but when they happen, they’re typically interesting — and under-the-radar. At some point following the September 9th announcement of the 2015 iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, iPad Pro and iPad mini 4, Apple quietly modified the tech specs and comparison pages for 2014’s iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, and iPad Air 2 to bump them all from Bluetooth 4.0 to Bluetooth 4.2, the latest version of the increasingly popular wireless standard. While the sixth-generation iPod touch shipped with Bluetooth 4.2, the original iPad Air, iPad mini 2, and iPhone 5s all remain on Bluetooth 4.0.

Bluetooth 4.2 notably promises up to 2.5x faster speeds and up to 10x greater data capacity over its predecessor, as well as improving privacy, security, and power efficiency. Apple is expected to release a new keyboard, Magic Mouse 2, and Magic Trackpad 2 featuring Bluetooth 4.2 technology…

Although it’s unclear whether a firmware update or changed hardware inside more recently manufactured iPhone 6 and iPad Air 2 devices is responsible for the new Bluetooth 4.2 support, upgraded firmware might be the answer. In the past, Bluetooth 1.o, 2.0 and 3.0 devices could not be upgraded to newer versions of the standard, but Bluetooth 4.0 devices were able to upgrade to Bluetooth 4.1 using product-specific software patches. Some reports have suggested, however, that Bluetooth 4.2’s speed and data capacity improvements would require new hardware, making Apple’s implementation somewhat curious.

We’ve reached out to Apple for additional details and will update this article when we receive them.

Filed under: AAPL Company, iOS Devices Tagged: Bluetooth, Bluetooth 4.2, iPad Air 2, iPhone 6, iphone 6 plus

Check out 9to5Mac for more breaking coverage of AAPL Company, iOS Devices, and iPhone 6.

What do you think? Discuss “Apple adds Bluetooth 4.2 to iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus and iPad Air 2” with our community.

Keep up with the best gear and deals on the web by signing up for the 9to5Toys Newsletter. Also, be sure to check us out on: Twitter, RSS Feed, Facebook, Google+ and Safari push notifications.

Today’s can’t miss deals:

Monoprice MFi Apple-Certified Lightning Cables in black or white w/ free shipping: 3-ft. $5, 6-ft. $6

Over-Ear Headphones: Sony Bluetooth/NFC $135 (Reg. $199), Beyerdynamic from $170 (Reg. up to $270), more

App Store Free App of the Week: Wake Alarm Clock ($4 value)

13″ Retina MacBook Pro (newest) 2.7GHz/8GB/256GB: $1,280 shipped (Reg. $1,499)

13″ Retina MacBook Pro (newest) 2.7GHz/8GB/128GB: $1,080 shipped (Reg. $1,299)

Giveaway: Trinity Delta aluminum earbuds feature a unique design and top-notch sound ($135 value), 20% discount

More new gear from today:

Games/Apps: Bloodborne from $25, Kirby Rainbow Curse $32, Shades Puzzle Game free, more iOS freebies

• Ecco shoes for Men and Women 50% off: Men’s Oxford Dress Shoes $70, more
• Daily Deals: Zipper Headphones $13, Aukey Car Jump Starter $50, more

More deals still alive:

Sony announces official PlayStation 4 price drop, bundles now start at just $349

Mac Bundle: 14 Mac Apps incl. RapidWeaver, Voila Screencapture, Kinemac 3D, more: $18

• Prime Members: Free 4-month subscription for 3 print magazines – GQ, Wired, more
• Headphones: Bose SoundTrue $100 (Reg. $120), Earbuds from $20, more
• JayBird BlueBuds X Sport Bluetooth Headphones $90 shipped (Reg. $130), more
• Freebies: Star Wars – Heroes Path for iOS + Iced Tea + Roast Beef sandwich + More!
• KMASHI 15,000mAh USB $14 (Reg. $20), Aukey 2A Wall Charger $8 (Reg. $16), more
• Pre-order Microsoft’s latest gadgets right now: Surface Pro 4, Surface Book, Band 2
• TP-LINK Wireless N Nano Router w/ 3-pack of networking cables (Refurb) $8 shipped
• Aukey USB Power Roundup: 6-Port 50W: $15, 5-port 40W: $10
• iPhone 6/s Accessories: 2-Pack Tempered Glass Screen Protector $3, more
• Harman Kardon 6-Piece Home Theater Speaker System $190 shipped (Orig. $649)
• Omaker 10W(2x5W) Portable Bluetooth 4.0 Speaker $22 Prime shipped (Reg. $35)
• Lytro Illum Camera, captures the entire light field: $700 shipped (Orig. $1,300)
• Tweetbot for Mac drops to $10 (Reg. $13)
• Philips hue Lux LED Starter Kit $60 shipped, 750-Lumen 9W LED Light Bulb $15
• Bluetooth Speakers: OontZ Splashproof $25 (Reg. $35), Aukey $13 (Reg. $20)
• Xbox One Gears of War bundle + 40″ HDTV $470 w/ .EDU, more
• Beyerdynamic A200p Portable DAC Headphone Amp $140 shipped (Reg. $200)
• Pebble Steel Smartwatch for iOS/Android in black or sliver $100 shipped (Orig. $230)
• Add Bluetooth/mic to any Aux speaker or headphones for $10 Prime shipped
• TiVO Roamio OTA HD DVR w/ Lifetime service for a one-time $300 fee
• VIZIO 49-inch 120Hz M-Series LED Smart 4K Ultra HDTV: $580 shipped (Reg. $720)
• Logitech Harmony Touch 15-Device Universal Remote: $100 shipped (Reg. $140)
• The Executive for iOS goes free as IGN’s Game of the Month ($5 value)
• Media: Blu-ray & DVDs from $3, Jurassic World pre-order, more
• TP-LINK AC Gigabit Router $40, more
• M-Audio Bundle: USB Condenser mic w/ stand, more $79 shipped (Reg. $100)
• Garmin nüvi 6-inch GPS w/ Bluetooth (Refurb) $140 shipped (Orig. $270)
• Motorola Nexus 6 Unlocked 32GB in Midnight Blue: $300 shipped (Reg. $499)

New products & more:

DJI’s new Osmo 4K camera is one expensive selfie stick

The latest littleBits DIY electronics kit turns any kid into an inventor

• Handmade at Amazon launches with an eye on knocking off Etsy
• Marvel’s updated plans for phase three of its cinematic universe + comicbook goodies
• Dyson includes air purification in its newest hot + cool bladeless fan
• Ever wonder what a $130K VIZIO Ultra HDTV looks like? Now we know.
• The latest entry in the Far Cry series goes Primal, taking gamers back to 10,000 BC
• Logitech’s new Harmony Home Hub Extender lets the pizza man in with your remote
• Roku’s new streaming media player supports 4K and finds your remote control for you
• Review: Rock Band 4 makes an old favorite come alive
• The new Dr. Who LEGO set looks just like TARDIS time machine
• Mattel’s retro-rebooted $30 VR View-Master is now available for iOS and Android
• Robo Wunderkind uses iOS connectivity and LEGO-like blocks to teach coding

Filed under: AAPL Company Tagged: 9to5Toys, Amazon, Amazon Gold Box, Best Buy, bluetooth headphones, coupon codes, Daily Deals, eBay, eBay Daily Deals, free apps, free shipping, Freebies, Lunch Break, MFi, MFi Lightning cable, Monoprice, New Toy of the Day, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox

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