Apple has teamed up with Adidas to offer 15% off Adidas products when you use Apple Pay.
The offer is valid when you use Apple Pay in the Adidas app through March 6th. Some exclusions apply.
The Adidas app can be found in Apple’s App Store here.
Ben Fox Rubin writes for CNET, “While Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant got busy over the past few years creating oodles of new skills and capabilities, Apple’s Siri seemed to be asleep.”
“Alexa came out with food delivery via voice commands back in early 2016. Siri, meanwhile, didn’t offer the same feature until last year,” Rubin writes. “Considering that contrast, it’s no secret Siri has fallen far behind its main competition in features and smart-home partners.”
“But, Apple has a plan to jump-start Siri and foster the same flurry of developer experimentation that made Alexa a hit. It’s doing that through Siri Shortcuts,” Rubin writes. “Shortcuts allows people to use Siri to control different iOS apps, letting folks take a selfie with their iPhones or get details on an upcoming flight all via voice commands.”
“Apple on Thursday announced a series of new app integrations with Siri Shortcuts, including Caviar (that’s right, food delivery), Merriam Webster Dictionary and Airbnb. Those apps join thousands — yes, thousands — of others that are already connected to Siri thanks to Shortcuts,” Rubin writes. “Apple’s ability to bring together thousands of new features to Siri in a short amount of time should give the Siri ecosystem the shot in the arm it’s needed.”
Read more in the full article here.
While this is normally a technology-oreiented web site, I couldn’t help but notice this and post it here.
A male had what seemly be a normal stuffy nose and a gradual loss of smell for the past year or so. What they finally found was the strangest thing they ever seen, so much so, that it ended up in a medical journal.
What did they discover? The man had a tooth growing in his nose! The man, who was not identified by name, had a CT scan at Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark which revealed a mucous-covered mass in his nasal cavity. His doctors suspected a dermoid cyst, which can take on a strange appearance and have hair or other bizarre features.
No word on the man’s condition or how/if the doctors dealt with it.
[Forbes]: Apple’s latest iPhones have had a rough time since they were announced in September 2018. Q4 numbers led to an unprecedented profits warning from Tim Cook and his team. But there are signs that the second quarter of 2019 will show an improvement.
While this is good news in regards to higher than projected sales, the breakdown of which units are popular with customers is going to make for uncomfortable reading. The new iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR handsets are expected to be shunned for the older and cheaper models - namely the iPhone 7 and iPhone 8 families. Apple Insider’s Roger Fingas reports on the last numbers from analysts at UBS:
UBS is boosting its June-quarter iPhone estimates from 32.5 million units to 34.5 million, though mostly on the basis that Apple is expected to sell more pre-2018 models. While UBS is predicting 3 million more iPhone XR sales, it's expecting an equal decrease in iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max shipments.
That’s going to lower Apple’s average selling price per handset, and limit the use of ‘gee-whizz’ technologies such as FaceID which are not present on the older models. And while iOS does offer support to older devices, there’s nothing the software can do to replicate newer technology that can pull the platform forwards and match up to the latest offerings from Android-focused manufacturers.
iPhone 8 Product (Red) (image: Apple PR)Apple
Where does this use case cause the most difficulty? China. Irrespective of the feature set or the power of iOS, the Chinese market is focused on the brand new, very high-end specifications, and if a piece of hardware runs WeChat. The latter is pretty much universal and iOS offers no advantage, while the former areas have seen Apple outclassed since the launch of the iPhone XS and XS Max.
The mid-cycle pick up is simply not there for the new design of iPhones which placed their focus on premium features and premium pricing. Apple may be holding steady in the saturated markets of the US and the EU, but its strategy is counter to the needs to the countries where there is still capacity for significant growth.
