Best Buy 4-Day Sale: Save at Least $350 on MacBook Pro and $250 on MacBook Air

Continuing its string of sales this week, Best Buy today launched a new 4-day sale that will end Saturday, April 28 at 11:59 p.m. CT. A variety of Apple products are included in the sale, including iPhone X, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and iPad, with MacBook Pro prices in particular at about the lowest we’ve ever seen.

For the MacBook Pro, students and parents of students can get the latest model with an Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB RAM, and 256GB hard drive for $1,399.99, down from $1,799.99. The $50 Student Deals bonus applies to all current-generation Mac notebooks.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Best Buy. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

Check out more information on the discounts in the list below:

• iPhone X – Save up to $499.99 with eligible trade-in with Verizon
• MacBook Pro – Save $350–$400 / as low as $1,399.99 with Student Deals
• MacBook Air – Save $250–$300 / as low as $699.99 with Student Deals
• 5th Generation iPad – Save $70–$80 / as low as $259.99 for 32GB Wi-Fi
• 21.5-inch iMac (3.4GHz, 8GB RAM, 1TB HD) – $1,299.99, down from $1,499.99
• Beats Studio3 Wireless Headphones – $239.99 in Blue, down from $349.99
• Beats Solo3 Wireless Headphones – $197.99 in Rose Gold, down from $299.99

There are also numerous non-Apple devices on sale for the rest of the week, some of which we’ve rounded up below:

• Get 50 percent off select Apple Watch bands by Exclusive / as low as $7.49
• Bragi The Dash – $99.99, down from $299.99
• Sony XB950B1 Wireless Over-the-Ear Headphones – $99.99, down from $179.99
• Ultimate Ears MEGABOOM – $141.99, down from $299.99

Best Buy also still has a few ongoing trade-in offers for those interested in iPad or Apple Watch. For the iPad, you can get a minimum $125 Best Buy gift card when trading in select previous-generation iPad models. The Apple Watch offer nets you $70 or more to put toward an Apple Watch Series 3 when you trade in any working Apple Watch in-store only.

Head over to Best Buy to shop all of the 4-day sale’s discounts, and then visit our Deals Roundup for more information on other sales and offers happening this week.

Related Roundup: Apple DealsTag: Best Buy
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The latest Harry Potter mobile game puts Hogwarts in your pocket

In Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery, which launched today for Android and iOS, players create their own character and progress through seven years of rigorous tutelage at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. They must choose their preferred House, survive potions class with Professor Snape, Transfigure themselves under the supervision of Professor McGonagall and even duel with other students. Not only that, players must also unravel the mystery as to why their in-game older brother was expelled from Hogwarts and reveal the sinister secrets he was pursuing.

The story is set in the 1980s, seven years before The Boy Who Lived enrolled at the school. Players will be treated to appearances from not only their favorite teachers and faculty from the story but also many of the main cast’s elder siblings, like Ron Weasley’s older brother, George.

“You’ll see characters like Professor Dumbledore, Professor Snape, Hagrid, and many more, who’ll appear and interact with the player character, during the game,” Matt London, a senior narrative designer at Jam City, told Engadget during a recent demo. “In addition, there are a bunch of new characters as well, that we’re introducing.”

The gameplay is easy enough that small children can play along. Navigating and interacting with the surrounding environments, whether that’s at Hogwarts proper or down in Diagon Alley, involves little more than taps and swipes of the screen. For example, when learning the Lumos charm from Professor Flitwick, players must trace the wand’s path to complete the spell — in this case, the shape of a caret. Or, when collecting materials for Snape’s potions class, players simple tap on the scene’s highlighted items.

It’s simple, mindless entertainment — about what you’d expect from a casual free-to-play game. The game often felt like a stripped-down version of Bully’s gameplay mechanics with the level of difficulty you’d find in The Simpsons: Tapped Out. It’s certainly not my cup of tea, but if you’re looking for a few minutes of distraction waiting for your bus by delving into the Harry Potter universe, this game serves as an effective time sink.

Beyond simplistic controls and gameplay, Hogwarts Mystery offers a robust avatar creation and customization scheme. “It was super important to us, that all Harry Potter fans feel like they can create a character that looks like them, and know that they belong in Hogwarts,” London explained. “So everything from lip shape, to eyebrow shape, nose shape, all these things are adjustable.” Players can also customize their character’s clothes and hairstyle using the game’s currency (which can be purchased for real-world money or slowly accumulated by completing various in-game tasks).

The game’s major selling point is the sheer scope and depth of its story. The Jam City team spent two years crafting the Hogwarts Mystery script, pouring in countless details, callbacks, and subtle nods from the entire book and film series, including Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

This is an extremely ambitious effort, especially for mobile. There have been at least a dozen other Harry Potter video games released since 2001 and virtually all of them focus on either a single school year or a specific book (like Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince from EA) for their subject matter. Heck, even the LEGO Harry Potter game only covered four school years worth of content at a time. To pack the entire bibliography into a single game, and recreate it so faithfully, is a testament to the Jam City team’s efforts over the past couple of years.

“This script that we’re working on, is fast approaching 200,000 words, and growing, which is longer than the novels,” London said. “It’s not a game that you’re going to want to sit down and play for 12 hours straight. That’s not the way it’s designed. We want players to feel like they have Hogwarts in their pocket all the time, and so, it’s a game that I hope players will play for months, if not for years.”

Even if you wanted to play of 12 hours straight, you simply can’t. The game utilizes a standard free-to-play trope wherein every action the player takes requires a set amount of “energy” which slowly regenerates over time. Once you’ve used up your current allotment, you’ll have to sit tight and wait for it to regrow before continuing.

From the hour-long demo that I watched, this game isn’t going to be challenging anybody’s dexterity or problem solving skills. There are small secrets and easter eggs tucked into the levels, to be sure. But for the most part, the game revolves around completing various tasks within an allotted amount of time, usually between one and eight hours. And even that is designed to be as low stress as possible.

Overall, Hogwarts Mystery is equal parts Choose Your Own Adventure, wherein the choices you make have a lasting impact how the story progresses, and Ready Player One, wherein the storytellers attempt to force as much nostalgia down your gullet as humanly possible. So if you’re looking for challenging fast-paced gameplay, look elsewhere. But if you want to live your best Hogwarts life in a richly-detailed universe faithfully crafted from the Harry Potter universe as JK Rowling herself would have imagined it, then Hogwarts Mystery is well worth a download.

Google joins others in making the gun emoji a water pistol

Google is updating its gun emoji to replace the image of a handgun with that of an orange and yellow water pistol. The change is, according to Emojipedia, rolling out to Android users in an update, and will help to make the squirt gun the de-facto symbol. It’s a big step towards eliminating images of handguns from the language, which was started by Apple in 2016.

The iPhone maker was the first to swap out a glyph of a real weapon for a toy, and other platforms have since followed suit. WhatsApp, Samsung and Twitter have all chosen to abandon symbols representing real weapons in favor of toys. The two holdouts these days are Microsoft, which controversially changed its symbol from a ’50s-style ray-gun to a pistol around the time Apple made its switch, and Facebook.

Microsoft said that it made its switch to ensure that the glyphs it sent were being commonly understood by others. After all, you don’t want to be responsible for symbol conflicts as people talk across platforms to one another. But it’s likely that, now that the tide has traveled the other way, both remaining outfits will seek to align themselves with the friendlier version of the emoji.

Source: Emojipedia

‘Tacoma’ brings space-sleuthing to PS4 on May 8th

Last August, Gone Home developer Fullbright released Tacoma on Xbox One, PC, Mac and Linux. It was an ambitious adventure game set on an empty space station in 2088; you played as a sort of space detective with access to immersive 3D recordings and personal files on crew-member computers. Now, Fullbright has announced that it’s bringing the game to PlayStation 4 on May 8th. The experience will be identical save for a new “Developer Commentary Mode” that includes two hours of writer, designer, artist and programmer insight. If you’re interested, the title is available for pre-order now with 20 percent off the usual asking price.

Source: PlayStation Blog

YouTube’s algorithms couldn’t detect graphic bestiality images

YouTube might have pulled 8.3 million videos violating its guidelines in the fourth quarter of 2017, but the platform is still plagued with various kinds of disturbing content. A new BuzzFeed report, for instance, has revealed that YouTube has been hosting images depicting bestiality for quite a while now. Certain search terms, including “girl and her horse” and “lovely smart girl playing baby cute dogs on rice,” surface videos that use thumbnails of women who seem to be engaging in sexual acts with horses and dogs.

The videos apparently feature women brushing, bathing and taking care of animals, with a camera moving around to take upskirt and crotch shots. An unnamed YouTube employee told BuzzFeed News that the platform’s thumbnail monitoring tech still isn’t as powerful as its video algorithms. He said it probably didn’t catch the bestiality thumbnails, because they lack the usual signifiers associated with typical porn, like human skin.

The employee also told the publication that the thumbnails are similar to the ones made by a Cambodian content farm, which got kicked off the website in 2017. That probably explains why multiple videos share the same explicit image. He said the use of bestiality shows “how the Cambodian content farm tactics are evolving.” One of the other reasons why YouTube might have missed the images is because the videos aren’t monetized, though their uploaders are likely planning to make money off their content in the future. And if YouTube doesn’t stop them, they could make a lot since some of their videos have amassed millions of views in the months they’ve been up on the website.

According to the publication, at least one of the offending accounts (SC Daily) also uploaded those bizarre videos masquerading as kid-friendly content. It said YouTube already started removing the videos featuring bestiality thumbnails, but a quick check shows that they’re still around. Some of them have been up on the website for over half a year, though most have been uploaded merely a few days ago. We even found one using a kid-themed profile and channel name.

In YouTube’s first Community Guidelines enforcement report, it said most of the videos it took down were flagged by its algorithms. Clearly, it has to beef up the algorithm monitoring its thumbnails. For now, you can report any disturbing content you find by going into the video, clicking the ellipsis icon and choosing Report.

Source: BuzzFeed

Philips’ huge 4K monitor is the first with super-bright HDR

DisplayHDR certification assures consumers of an excellent standard of monitor performance, but none have received the top level — until now. Philips’ 43-inch Momentum (436M6) is the first to get HDR1000 approval, guaranteeing a superb 1,000 cd/m2 brightness, deep blacks, 10-bit color depth and an HDR-compliant color gamut. To pull it off, Philips used Quantum Dot tech, much like Samsung uses on its QLED TVs and monitors. It also features Ambiglow technology that puts a halo of light on your walls and floor, matching the content on the screen.

The beauty of DisplayHDR is that you don’t even to look at a product’s specs to know what you’ll get. There are three standards, DisplayHDR 400, 600 and 1000. At the HDR 1000 level, it must put out at least 1,000 cd/m2 of brightness, or 600 cd/m2 over a long duration, around two to four times what you’re getting on your current display. All DisplayHDR levels must also support a 955:1 contrast ratio, 10-bits per color of image processing, and cinema-quality color gamuts.

Naturally, these specs are ideal for watching HDR movies on Blu-ray or Netflix, but also for creating such content in the first place. As such, Philips is offering something called MultiView, which lets you simultaneously connect a PC and set-top box, for instance. That way, you can easily switch between watching Stranger Things and, say, color-correcting Stranger Things, if you happen to work on that show.

The Momentum 436M36 isn’t cheap at $1,000, but it’s in line with the price of other DisplayHDR monitors like the smaller HDR600-certified, $450 HP Pavilion Gaming 32 HDR display. It will arrive sometime this summer.

Source: Philips

Lexus to Begin CarPlay Rollout in New Vehicles in September

Lexus has announced that its first vehicle with CarPlay will be available in September 2018 at dealerships across the United States.

2019 Lexus ES
That vehicle will be the new 2019 Lexus ES, equipped with an eight-inch touchscreen through which CarPlay can be controlled. The sedan also features Siri Eyes Free and Amazon Alexa voice control, but lacks Android Auto support. An optional navigation system with a 12.3-inch widescreen display will be available.

CarPlay will also be a standard feature in the all-new 2019 Lexus UX crossover, but that vehicle doesn’t go on sale until December 2018.

Lexus has previously said its CarPlay implementation is wired, so an iPhone must be connected via USB. BMW remains the only automaker to offer wireless CarPlay in new vehicles, despite the functionality being introduced in 2015. Alpine Electronics sells an aftermarket wireless CarPlay system for other vehicles.

Lexus and its parent company Toyota first announced plans to offer CarPlay in January, after years of holding out on the platform. Toyota’s rollout will begin with the 2019 Avalon, available in May at dealerships in the United States, to be followed by the 2019 RAV4 and 2019 Corolla Hatchback later this year.

Toyota and Lexus plan to expand CarPlay to several other 2019 model year vehicles with Entune 3.0 and Enform 2.0 systems respectively. The rollout will likely include the yet-to-be-announced 2019 Camry and 2019 Sienna, given the 2018 models of those vehicles are already equipped with Entune 3.0 systems.

A spokesperson for Toyota and Lexus previously told MacRumors that they do not currently plan to offer CarPlay in pre-2019 vehicles.

Related Roundup: CarPlayTags: Toyota, Lexus
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YouTube Remix could mean the end of Google Play Music

Google will reportedly shutter Google Play Music as part of a long-rumored audio and video cleanup. According to Droidlife, the subscription streaming service — a rival to Spotify, Apple Music and others — will be replaced by YouTube Remix later this year. The new offering will reportedly offer both on-demand music and video clips sourced from YouTube. In short, it’ll be Play Music and YouTube Music (the fate of which is still unclear) mashed together. YouTube Remix has been teased since mid-2017 and was slated for a March 2018 release by Bloomberg last December. (Obviously, that didn’t happen.) Droidlife is now reporting that Google Play Music users will be forced to migrate by the end of 2018.

The death of Google Play Music will be a disappointment to some. It’s a capable service with smart, personalized playlists, a decent web interface, and a “locker” system for streaming your personal library. The latter feature is quite rare — Amazon is ending its equivalent service, leaving Apple Music as the only realistic alternative. For diehard record collectors, this could be a huge problem if Google decides to axe its own locker system with the introduction of YouTube Remix. Still, the rumored app is (another) opportunity for Google to simplify its music and video services. It’s unclear, though, if that will be enough to close the gap with Spotify.

Source: Droidlife

Twitter sees another profit as user numbers grow

Three months ago, Twitter was able to tell the world that, for the first time in its 12-year life, it had made a profit. The company can now say that those good numbers weren’t a blip, since it has now notched a first quarter profit of $61 million. That’s down a little from the $91 million it made in the previous three months, but the news is good enough to get the champagne corks popping in San Francisco.

At the end of Twitter’s 2017 financial year, the company had 330 million monthly active users, of which 68 million were based in the US. Three months later, and the figure has leapt to 336 million, of which five million users came from overseas, with the remaining million signups coming from locals. Twitter has also claimed that its (otherwise secret) daily user numbers have grown by 10 percent this quarter, down a little from the holidays, but still healthy.

Twitter attributes this growth to a number of factors, including the addition of several new products like bookmarks and video timestamps. Efforts to create “new, curated timelines of tweets around breaking news events,” are also helping to drive engagement, and eyeballs. The company is also saying that it’s seeing results in its information quality and safety work: euphemisms for a crackdown on malicious bot-and-troll activity.

In the last 16 months, we have made more than 30 individual changes to our product, policies and operations, all with the goal of making Twitter safer, and improving information quality on our service. #TWTR

— Twitter Investor Relations (@TwitterIR) April 25, 2018

It is almost never a slow news day on the internet anymore and, like Facebook, Twitter cannot simply hide behind its role as a platform. It has become used as a method to quickly spread propaganda and misinformation, especially after a breaking news event. Earlier this month, the company said that it is trying to tackle those who are “deliberately manipulating” conversations in the wake of tragedies. In the aftermath of the YouTube shooting, Twitter says it began asking people to take down tweets that violate its policies.

The recent crackdown on bulk tweeting from multiple accounts, known as Tweetdecking, has seen the use of fake accounts fall by around 90 percent. Twitter also says that it has spent the last three months killing nearly 150,000 apps that had connected to its APIs for the use of bulk tweeting. The company said those apps were responsible for “130 million low-quality tweets,” and their removal should improve things in future. Twitter has also said that its ability to track malicious, automated and spam users has “improved significantly” over the period.

And all of these positive signs are showing on the balance sheet, where advertising revenue and money generated from data licensing grew year-on-year. Twitter made revenues of $665 million, and after expenses, the aforementioned $61 million profit. The company also explained that last year’s tax cuts helped slash its tax rate from 37 percent to 24 percent. Consequently, $21 million that would have otherwise gone to state and federal government is now in Twitter’s back pocket.

A big driver of all of this growth has been video, which now accounts for more than half of all Twitter’s advertising revenues. The company also said that Japan has become the second-largest market for revenue, and expects Asia-Pacific profits to overtake the US in the near future. Video revenues are set to increase this summer, too, after Twitter signed a deal with Fox Sports to broadcast highlight clips from this year’s World Cup.

Looking forward, Twitter expects its revenue figures to remain relatively flat going in to the next quarter at around $245 million. Given that the company managed to under-promise and under-deliver on those figures this time around — at least in the eyes of Wall Street — it may repeat the trick in the second quarter.

This breaking news story is developing, please refresh for more information.

Source: Twitter (.PDF)

Dell 2-in-1 has an unknown Intel and AMD ‘Pro’ graphics chip

Dell has unveiled its new professional PC lineup, and among them was the intriguing 15-inch Precision 5530 2-in-1. Dell calls it the “world’s smallest 15-inch 2-in-1 workstation,” and it packs a lot of nice specs into a small, 4.36 pound body. Most interestingly, though, it comes with up to Intel’s Core i7-8706G with “Radeon Pro WX Vega M GL graphics” — the first mention of a “Pro WX” version of Intel and AMD’s new compact chipset.

Other specs include 32GB of RAM max, up to 2TB of SSD storage, two Thunderbolt 3 and two USB-C 3.1 ports (that also charge it), and an all-new InfinityEdge 4K with 10-point multi-touch, optional active pen support, and 100 percent Adobe RGB coverage. In other words, the Precision 5530 2-in-1 is aimed at graphics professionals, not gamers.

The new Pro WX Vega M graphics might be identical, hardware-wise, to the regular version but with more stable, professionally-oriented drivers, rather than all-new chips. As a reminder, AMD Radeon Pro RX Vega M GL graphics offers performance about equal to NVIDIA’s GTX 1050 Ti graphics, but below the GTX 1060. At the same time, it’s much more compact and power-friendly than NVIDIA’s offerings, allowing for smaller discrete-graphics laptops with better battery life.

Dell also unveiled the regular Precision 5530 (above), with a similar screen and memory options, but in a smaller 3.9-pound package and with Intel 8th-generation Core i7 or Intel Xeon CPUs and up to NVIDIA Quadro P2000 graphics. There’s no word on pricing for the Precision 5530 2-in-1, but the regular Precision 5530 starts at a pretty decent $1,449 for what we imagine is a fairly bare-bones version. That model will be available on May 22nd, but you’ll have to wait for the July/August 2018 time frame for the 2-in-1.

Source: Dell