Technology

What's Up With Apple: MacBook Air Price Drop, Another Lawsuit, and More

Paul Ausick

Published: April 23, 2021 7:55 am

While most of us are arguing about whether the purple iPhone 12 introduced by Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) last Tuesday is, in fact, gorgeous, Amazon has dropped the price on a 256GB MacBook Air to $899. That’s the lowest price to the masses for that M1-equipped laptop since Cyber Monday.

It is about $200 less than a new 12.9-inch iPad Pro will cost you for the same powerful M1 chip, but minus the XDR miniLED display. Plus, the MacBook Air’s screen is slightly larger.

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We bring this up because it is hard to see how the full power of the new iPad Pro can be unleashed by anyone but a real, well, pro. If you make movies or music or photos for a living (or want to), then the iPad Pro might be the Apple device for you. For most of us, though, we’d just be paying the extra cash to be cool. But that’s worth something, too.

A federal judge in Sacramento has rejected Apple’s motion to dismiss a potential class-action lawsuit claiming that the way Apple defines “buy” is misleading when it comes to buying or renting movies from the App Store. It boils down to what people expect when they buy a video at the App Store.

The plaintiff, David Andino, claims that because Apple reserves the right to terminate access to content the people have purchased, it is “deceptive” for the company to say that someone has bought something. District Court Judge John Mendez sums it up this way, according to The Hollywood Reporter:

Apple contends that “[n]o reasonable consumer would believe” that purchased content would remain on the iTunes platform indefinitely. But in common usage, the term “buy” means to acquire possession over something. It seems plausible, at least at the motion to dismiss stage, that reasonable consumers would expect their access couldn’t be revoked.

Judge Mendez continued:

[T]he injury Plaintiff alleges is not, as Apple contends, that he may someday lose access to his purchased content. Rather, the injury is that at the time of purchase, he paid either too much for the product or spent money he would not have but for the misrepresentation. This economic injury is concrete and actual, not speculative as Apple contends …

An Apple supplier based near Shanghai suffered a fire Thursday that killed two firefighters and six civilians, according to a report in the South China Morning Post. The supplier, Casetek Group, is a subsidiary of Taiwan-based Pegatron, and the plant that burned was owned by another subsidiary. Casetek supplied Apple with chassis for both MacBooks and iPads.

Finally, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday that Apple is planning to increase advertising space on the search page of the App Store, taking advantage of the company’s access to people’s private information while restricting access by other companies and developers.