Sony Drops Playstation Price

Sony's PlayStation 4 is finally getting its price cut.

The electronics giant announced it will trim the price of the video game console from $399.99 to $349.99 in the U.S. beginning October 9. It's the first time Sony has slashed the price of PS4 in the U.S. since it launched November 2013.

"Our goal at PlayStation has always been to offer the best place to play at a compelling value to gamers," said Shawn Layden, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America in a statement Thursday. "We're continuing to deliver on that commitment with this new price for PS4, making the console even more accessible to a broader audience this holiday."

Sony jumped out to an early lead on console sales thanks to a lower initial price of $399, compared to rival Xbox One and its $499 price point. That prompted Microsoft to aggressively cut the price of Xbox One to $349 and ditch its motion sensor Kinect as an additional accessory.

New Overpriced Speakers

The latest Beats By Dr. Dre speakers has a new look and an app to go along with it.

The new Beats Pill+ wireless Bluetooth speaker ($229.95), available in black and white, will be available at retail and on Apple.com next month. Slightly larger than the original Pill speaker, the Beats Pill+ has two tweeters and two woofers -- the previous model used four small woofers -- for improved sound.

Beats engineers have employed a two-way active crossover, an approach not often used for a small Bluetooth speaker, says company president Luke Wood. "Everything is very specific and concise as to what is going to what speaker," he said. "We think that gives us the control over tonality and the kind of sound field dispersion you don’t get with other technologies."

The speaker, which charges in three hours and has a 12-hour battery life, comes with a lightning cable that connects to its USB port so that you can charge an iPhone or iPad as it's used as a music source.

Apple Malware

For almost a year, Chinese hackers have leveraged a novel one-two punch to compromise iOS devices, including non-jailbroken iPhones, then seed them with adware, a security company said today.

                                                   

The malware, dubbed "YiSpecter," was written in China by Chinese hackers, and what screen text was displayed was in Chinese, said Ryan Olson, director of the Unit 42 threat intelligence unit at Santa Clara, Calif.-based Palo Alto Networks, in an interview. The malware was distributed almost exclusively in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan.

Palo Alto's Claud Xiao was the prime researcher behind the discovery of YiSpecter's capabilities. Xiao has been on a roll of late: He was also a driver behind the analysis of XcodeGhost, another adware campaign that used a different-but-just-as-unusual infection vector.

Apple Pay is a Dud So Far

Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has called 2015 the “year of Apple Pay.” So far it’s been underwhelming.

The mobile-payments system, which marks its one-year anniversary this month, has failed to catch on with consumers, accounting for only 1 percent of all retail transactions in the U.S., according to researcher Aite Group. The service -- which allows users to pay for purchases by tapping their iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch on a device at cash registers -- has suffered from a lack of promotion and limited number of terminals available in stores. Plus Apple Pay is only available on newer iPhones.

“People don’t know why it is they’d use Apple Pay,” said Jared Schrieber, CEO of InfoScout, a shopper-research firm. “They are satisfied with the current methods and they don’t know how Apple Pay works.”

Apple, which relies on new products to sustain growth, entered a nascent market when it introduced its mobile-payments system last year. A similar feature had been available in Google Inc.’s smartphones through Wallet since 2011, yet adoption was anemic, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. Like most things Apple, expectations were high for the payment service, which was seen as a potential rival to PayPal. In January, Cook spoke of “momentum” for Apple Pay, which, he said, was “off to a very strong start” and being implemented by banks, credit unions and numerous merchants.

Competitors have followed -- Samsung Pay and Google’s Android Pay were both introduced this year -- but the consumer hasn’t yet. Merchants who adopted the system say that demand has been tepid.

iOS Users Are STUPID!!

After Apple released the new OS X El Capitan on Wednesday, users streamed to a Microsoft support discussion forum to report that Office 2016 for Mac regularly crashed, crippling their productivity.

"This is beyond the Pale. We basically can't use Office on our computers," wrote Watson Scott Swail today on the longest thread related to the crash problem.

Let me see now…. MSFT builds a product for a specific version of iOS. The user changes versions and it’s MSFTs fault?

Gimme a break!! Apple iOS users are really dumb!!

Amazon To Stop Selling Apple and Google Video Products

Amazon.com Inc. will stop selling media-streaming devices from Google Inc. and Apple Inc. that aren’t easily compatible with its video service, the latest example of the company using its clout to promote products that fit with its own retailing strategy.

The Seattle-based Web retailer sent an e-mail to its marketplace sellers that it will stop selling the Apple TV and Google’s Chromecast since those devices don’t "interact well" with Prime Video. No new listings for the products will be allowed and posting of existing inventory will be removed Oct. 29, Amazon said. Prime Video doesn’t run easily on its rival’s hardware.

Roku Inc.’s set-top device, Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox and Sony Corp.’s PlayStation, which work with Amazon’s video service, aren’t affected, it said. Amazon’s Fire TV stick, which plugs into an HDMI port to connect televisions with streaming services such as Netflix and Prime Video, is the company’s best-selling electronic device.

The move, coming just before the year-end holiday shopping season, shows how Amazon is willing to sacrifice sales of popular brand name products -- Apple and Google have the best-selling media streaming devices generally -- to bolster its own video-streaming service. Amazon has invested heavily in online content, including producing its own exclusive shows such as the award-winning transgender comedy "Transparent", as a way to attract new Prime subscribers, who pay $99 a year for speedy shipping and access to video and other services.

Google and MSFT Come to Agreement

Peace has broken out between Google and Microsoft, which agreed to dismiss all of their pending patent lawsuits against each other.

The agreement, the terms of which were not disclosed, mean that about 20 different lawsuits in Germany and the United States involving issues as varied as mobile phones, wireless networking, video decoding and other technologies will go away. In a joint statement, the companies said the cases included those related to Motorola Mobility, the smartphone maker that Google sold last year to Lenovo.

The companies also said they agreed to “collaborate on certain patent matters and anticipate working together in other areas in the future to benefit our customers.”

Although Microsoft has struggled to compete in the marketplace against smartphones based on Google’s Android operating system, it has struck patent licensing agreements with many of the biggest makers of Android smartphones, including Samsung. (Microsoft settled a lawsuit this year involving a contract with Samsung over patent royalty payments. Analysts estimate that it earns billions of dollars a year in such royalty payments.