Apple's AirPods are by all measures a victory for the company, with Apple retail stores quickly blowing through received stock. However, online orders placed through Apple are in some cases shipping weeks earlier than advertised.
We recommend contacting your local Apple Store if you plan on picking these up for the Holidays.
“One of the memes to come out of the somewhat contentious rollout of the MacBook Pro is that Apple has given up on the desktop Mac,” Matthew Panzarino reports for TechCrunch.
“In a posting to an employee message board, CEO Tim Cook seems intent on putting that particular branch of discussion to bed,” Panzarino reports. “‘Some folks in the media have raised the question about whether we’re committed to desktops,’ Cook wrote. ‘If there’s any doubt about that with our teams, let me be very clear: we have great desktops in our roadmap. Nobody should worry about that.'”
You can rarely see precisely where you want to go from the beginning. In retrospect, it’s always written like that. But it’s rarely like that. The fantastic thing about Apple employees is they get excited about something, and they want to know how it works. What it will do. What its capabilities are. If they want to know about something in an entirely different industry, they start pulling the string and see where it takes them. They’re focused more on the journey, which enables so many great things to happen. Just in the past couple years, pulling that string on Watch and fitness led to ResearchKit, and ResearchKit led to CareKit. We’ve got a ton of things on our roadmap that I can’t talk about, but that I’m incredibly excited about, that are the result of pulling that string and not being bound by the box that so many people in life get bound by. — Tim Cook
“A woman found her missing husband’s body before police were able to by using the Find My iPhone app to track him to a car wreck,” Jennifer Smith reports for The Daily Mail. “Jayesh Patel, 49, failed to return to his home in Pacifica near San Francisco, California, on Friday night, prompting his wife to report his disappearance to police.”
“She tracked his cell phone to the interchange of highways 101 and 92 on Saturday where she found his body trapped inside his totaled Mercedes,” Smith reports. “Mr Patel is believed to have veered off the ramp at some point late on Friday night and fallen some 30ft in the car.”
“California Highway Patrol pried him out of the vehicle on Saturday after being called to the scene by his devastated wife,” Smith reports. “Local residents questioned why it took so long for anyone to come across the man’s body at such a busy stretch of road. Friends paid tribute to Mr Patel as a ‘family man’ and experienced colleague after hearing of his death.”
Read more in the full article here.
(CNBC): Nintendo's first proper smartphone game has proved to be a huge hit. According to the company, Super Mario Run was downloaded more than 40 million times in its first four days of availability on iOS, breaking the App Store record for number of downloads during that span. Previous reports pegged the game's debut at around 2.85 million downloads in its first day, though these are the first official numbers to come from Nintendo.
That success was aided in part by a global launch, that saw Super Mario Run debut in 140 different countries. Nintendo doesn't say how many players actually spent money on the game; while it's free to download, Super Mario Run requires a one-time $9.99 fee to unlock the entire game, a relatively high price tag on mobile that has proved a sticking point for many users and investors. However, Nintendo does say that the game managed to reach the top 10 highest-grossing charts in 100 countries.
Since its debut Nintendo has updated Super Mario Run with a handful of small features, including new holiday-themed items for the game's kingdom building mode. However, the company recently told The Wall Street Journal that it had no plans for any large content updates for the game, either free or paid.
The popularity of the game is obviously good news for Nintendo, as the company is hoping to parlay that success to help its flagging console business. Just as Pokémon Go did previously, Nintendo is hoping that Super Mario Run will push new users to more traditional Nintendo game experiences on the company's own hardware.
"I feel like Mario was what introduced millions of people to video games and interactive entertainment, and I think that Mario will continue to serve that role," series creator Shigeru Miyamoto told The Verge prior to the mobile game's launch. "And I think with Super Mario Run that's exactly what's going to happen." Nintendo plans to follow Super Mario Run with mobile versions of Fire Emblem and Animal Crossing.
