Sony smart TVs, Echo speakers and more accessories are on sale today
Save $199 on your new 13-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 processor
Apple Watch Series 6, AirPods Pro, and more devices are on sale today
Of course, the official news today begin with deals, Pocketnow.com is packed full of mother’s day buying guides and deals that you might still be on time to take advantage of. Let’s begin with Apple’s M1 MacBook Pro which is currently at an all time low. We’ve never seen it with a 200 dollars discount until today on Amazon, leaving the 512 gigs of storage model for 1300 bucks shipped. This is pretty much like buying the base model with double the storage. Moving on to B&H, they have the Apple Watch Series 6 for 50 dollars off, leaving the GPS variant for 449 or the LTE variant for 100 dollars off, leaving it at 599. Back to Amazon, they’re currently running a Mother’s Day sale on their speakers, like in the case of the new Echo Dot which is 35 dollars off, leaving it at 40 bucks. The Echo Show 5 is available for half off, leaving it at 60 dollars with a Blink Mini cam, and I swear for these surveillance cameras as the best ban for the buck, and you can also get a Fire Stick Lite for just 25 dollars. We have more deals on other Apple products, Samsung monitors and more in the description.
Facebook and Instagram have already begun to test Apple’s patience with new practices
Let’s move on to talking about shady practices and my least favorite company, Facebook. If you think I go to hard on them, trust me I’m just warming up. iOS 14.5 was released earlier last week, and by the way make sure to update to 14.5.1 for some security reasons. Thing is, the original update now let’s you fully control whether Apps track you or not, and you know Facebook has ran a full campaign against this because of how it hurts their business. Apple even made it clear that developers could not use sleazy means to convince you to be tracked, but I guess Facebook just defied that cause they just did the opposite. Whenever you log into Facebook or Instagram, you get a prompt that tells you, you’re now on iOS 14.5. They explain the situation to users and then go on to say, “We use information about your activity from other aps and websites to: Show you Personalized Ads, and get this.. *Keep Facebook Free of Charge* and of course, support small businesses that rely on ads”. So yes, the threat now is that you could eventually be forced to pay for Facebook, which let’s be real, will be the moment that platform will die cause no one is that stupid. And let’s be real, ads are still gonna be there, there’s no reason to make consumers think they will now have to pay for a service, when ads will not be going away, they just won’t be personalized if you choose to opt out. We’ll see how Apple proceeds with this move as they have been vocal about even removing Facebook from the app store if they don’t comply.
More proof that the Samsung Galaxy S21 FE is close
Alright, let’s move the spotlight on to Samsung but, before we get to Ultra territory, let’s talk about the Galaxy S21 FE. Last year’s S20 FE was a major hit for the company, so it makes sense for the company to follow up on this success. So far, we’ve seen some renders for the device along with leaks that claimed that we’d be getting a 6.4-inch AMOLED display, powered by the Snapdragon 888 or the Exynos 2100 along with a 4800 mAh battery and up to 256 Gigs of storage. That’s all great but, we were lacking a launch date. Well, now we have a new tweet from Ross Young claiming that production for the S21 FE is set to start some time in July. He also went on and listed the color variants we could expect, that being Gray, Light Green, Light Violet and White, which will definitely get fancier names at launch. So yeah, we don’t have an exact launch date but with mass production starting in July.. It pretty much signals that we’re getting it at the Fall Unpacked, and who knows, maybe even with the foldables? If you think of it, it does make sense as a regular and affordable smartphone option for those not looking for an expensive foldable update.
iPhone 13 dummy unit teaches us a lot about what’s to come
Speaking of things we’re supposed to be getting in the Fall, let’s talk iPhones. If you haven’t been paying attention, Lew at Unbox Therapy recently published a video with an iPhone 13 Pro Max Dummy, that was provided by Ben Geskin based on leaked schematics. Of course, it may not be the actual design but, these schematics are kind of accurate. From these dummies we can see the smaller notch which is still noticeable but drastically smaller since they rearranged the Face ID components. On the back, probably the biggest change is on the camera lenses. You can tell that these are much larger and according to Ming Chi Kuo we should expect an upgraded ultra-wide camera that has a brighter aperture and autofocus. Something else we should be expecting on these new iPhones is LTPO 120Hz OLED Displays that will apparently be solely provided by Samsung. Yes, we know Apple is very late to this, but at least we’re finally gonna get the feature. I guess the most important take away is that this dummy proves that we’re in line for an S year since the changes are not really what I’d call significant. We’ll see, as maybe the display and camera design changes might warrant a jump to iPhone 13 instead.
Story of the day:
Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra Camera Tipped to be Years Ahead of Everyone Else
And Finally, for the hottest news today, let’s keep talking camera hardware upgrades but this time let’s talk Samsung. Let’s just say that what Samsung is preparing for the S22 Ultra is so bold, that it encompasses all the rumors and partnerships we’ve been covering for more than a year, according to a new leak from Ice Universe. On a Weibo post he mentions that S22 Ultra will bring continuous optical zoom, an under-screen camera, and a new form of GPU made by Samsung and AMD in an interesting collaboration. To dabble a little into all of them, Samsung and AMD partnered up a while ago and according to some benchmarks, even Apple should be worried about this GPU. Maybe my only concern is that if I remember correctly, this GPU was for their Exynos chips, and not necessarily something a Qualcomm counterpart would support. The last time we got Exynos only Galaxy phones was the S6 and that didn’t go so well. Regarding the under-display camera, we’re expecting it to make a debut on the Galaxy Z Fold 3, so that should shed some light. But what has me the most excited is the continuous zoom camera as, we’re finally not just talking about different focal lengths here, this is technically real zoom here, or at least we think. Hard to tell if this has anything to do with the rumored collaboration with Olympus, but we’ll keep you posted.
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