There’s a good chance the Google Pixel 8 will be unveiled at Google I/O 2024 on May 14, so it’s perhaps no surprise the pace of the associated leaks is picking up – and the latest major leak we’ve seen covers Pixel 8a promo images and pricing.
This is via the usually reliable @OnLeaks and Smartprix, and to start with the pricing, it looks as though worries about a price hike may have been unfounded: the Pixel 8a pricing is said to be $499 ( with 128GB of storage), and $559 (with 256GB) in the US.
Apple Card users can get extra Daily Cash back this week for Nike purchases thanks to a special Apple Pay promotion Apple is running with Nike.
From April 25 through May 2, Apple Card owners will get 10 percent Daily Cash back on Nike purchases made using Apple Pay. The deal is available on the Nike website, the Nike app, and at U.S. Nike Stores.
Customers can earn up to $50 back, which means the extra cash is available for up to $500 in purchases.
Daily Cash is a benefit available to Apple Card owners. With each purchase, immediate cash back rewards are available. Apple typically provides two percent cash back for Apple Pay purchases, three percent for Apple Pay purchases at Apple locations, and one percent for everything else. Some retailers, such as Nike, have special deals with Apple where users can get three percent cash back.
The limited time deal is a seven percent total increase in Daily Cash back on Nike purchases.
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of “Let Loose” and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more …
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has “fallen sharply beyond expectations.” As a…
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the…
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple’s annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider…
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU…
April 18, 1996: Apple unveils a massive $15 million promotional tie-in for the Mission: Impossible movie starring Tom Cruise.
Designed to promote the PowerBook, which Cruise uses in the spy flick, the marketing campaign comes at a particularly bad time. Attempting to climb back into the black after reporting its largest quarterly loss ever, Apple is in the middle of trying to perform its very own impossible mission. And that’s just the start of the problems.
Mission: Impossible PowerBook promo
1996 stands as probably the nadir of Apple’s nasty ’90s. Just a couple of weeks before the Mission: Impossible promo campaign, Apple reported a quarterly loss of $740 million. The shocking scale of the loss — with more than half coming from $1 billion in unsold products — revealed a company in far worse shape than previously thought.
The Mission: Impossible deal was an attempt to imbue Apple with some much-needed cool.
As part of the expensive campaign, Apple launched a “Mission: Impossible — The Web Adventure” site, an early example of online movie advertising. (You can still see Apple’s Mission: Impossible site, although the game sadly no longer works.)
Apple product placement in Mission: Impossible
Apple’s big Hollywood promo proved about as effective as a shoe phone. Screenshot: Apple
The deal also ensured that the PowerBook 5300c got screen time in the movie. Unfortunately, Apple and Paramount Pictures signed the deal so late that Cupertino got no input on the script’s tech elements.
As a result, the Mac shown in the movie uses a command-line interface instead of Mac OS. That made it look way behind the Windows 95 operating system then running on PCs.
Even worse, when a particularly tough job turns up later in the movie, the Mission: Impossible team’s resident computer expert advises the use of nonexistent “Thinking Machines laptops.”
Apparently, only those fictional computers could get the job done. Ouch!
PowerBook 5300: On-screen and on fire, but not on store shelves
A final problem dogged Apple’s Mission: Impossible promo campaign: The PowerBook 5300 wasn’t available to buy when the movie hit theaters. And, soon after the first 1,000 PowerBook 5300 units shipped to dealers around the United States, news broke that two production units caught fire — one at the home of an Apple programmer, the other at Apple’s factory in China.
“The main hallmark for Apple is ease of use,” wrote Pieter Hartsook, editor of The Hartsook Letter, at the time. “If your machine doesn’t work, it’s not easy to use.”
Apple issued a recall on the 100 PowerBook 5300s already sold, replacing the computers with another model. Unfortunately, the replacements packed only two-thirds the hard drive capacity of their predecessors. That forced Apple to lower the price of the laptop by $100.
As a result, moviegoers who saw the PowerBook 5300 plastered on the silver screen could not buy the computer. Not that many people could afford the pricey machines: The top-end PowerBook 5300ce came with a $6,500 price tag, making it the most expensive Apple laptop ever. (Adjusted for inflation, that’s nearly $13,000 today.)
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April 18, 1996: Apple unveils a massive $15 million promotional tie-in for the Mission: Impossible movie starring Tom Cruise.
