Technology - Google News |
- Trade-in deals: Get a $20 bonus on all trades ahead of Apple's 'iPhone XS' and 'iPhone XC'
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider: The Kotaku Review
- Apple's upcoming iPad Pro rumored to switch from Lightning to USB-C
| Posted: 10 Sep 2018 08:31 AM PDT With Apple's "Gather Round" event commencing in two days, we're rounding up where to get the most money for your used iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac leading up to the rumored "iPhone XS" and "iPhone XC" announcements. Plus, get a $20 bonus at top providers with our exclusive coupons.  As consumers await new iPhone models expected to be announced Sept. 12, now is the time to lock in a price quote for your used device. Considering values typically drop when new phones are released, you can weather the dip in prices and get the most money for your pre-owned device by securing a quote now thanks to special bonuses being offered by leading providers. Plus, there's no downside to locking in an offer early, given that you are not bound to send your device in if you later choose not to. In fact, you can always lock in a higher rate later with the same —or alternative service —if a better offer presents itself. Right now, though, AI readers can secure a $20 cash bonus on every Apple device with coupon code appleinsider at MyPhones Unlimited. BuyBackWorld, also an AppleInsider partner, is offering a $10 bonus on all trades over $50 with promo code APPLEINSIDER10 —or a $20 bonus on trade-ins valued at $200 or more with code APPLEINSIDER20. Gazelle is running a limited-time promotion extending price locks through Oct. 19, so you have more time to mail in your used device. BuyBack World BuyBackWorld has been a fixture in our Trade-In Payout Guide for several years and operates its electronics buyback service in very much the same manner as Gazelle and MyPhones Unlimited, and often paying industry-leading rates. To begin, you first lock in your trade-in price by visiting BuyBackWorld's website, where you will be asked to assess the physical and operational condition of your device. A few days after locking in your price quote, a pre-paid shipping box will show up on your doorstep. You'll then have a 30-day grace period from the time you lock in your trade-in offer to the time you need to pack the device securely in the box and drop it in the mail. Alternately, you can use your own shipping box and simply print and affix a pre-paid shipping label from BuyBackWorld's website during the price lock process. Once BuyBackWorld receives and inspects your old device, the company will issue payment via PayPal or one of the many other available methods, including check, Quick Pay or Quick Pass. $10 to $20 Bonus Cash on all Apple Trade-ins over $50 In addition to above average cash payouts, BuyBackWorld is now offering AppleInsider readers an additional $20 bonus on all Apple device trade-ins valued at $200 or more when you use the links below and apply exclusive coupon code APPLEINSIDER20 during the price lock process (where it says "Enter a promotional code"). Readers with Apple trades valued at $50 to $199 can also take advantage of a $10 cash bonus with promo code APPLEINSIDER10. Both coupons work on non-Apple trade-ins as well, so if you have a Samsung Galaxy S8 or Google Pixel collecting dust, it can easily be traded for cash to upgrade to a new iPhone. A complete, detailed list of BuyBackWorld's current iPad and iPhone trade in cash payouts can be found on BuyBackWorld's website. The $20 bonus ends Sept. 30. With the $20 cash bonus using promo code APPLEINSIDER20, BuyBackWorld is currently paying out the following for iPhones valued at $200 or more: Apple iPhone X: Up to $575 * BuyBackWorld is also offering AppleInsider readers a $20 cash bonus on iPads valued at $200 or more, including Pro models. Below is a sampling of current cash payouts; more iPad trade-in values can be found on BuyBackWorld's site.  iPad trade-in values (cash payouts) 64GB 10.5" iPad Pro (Wi-Fi Only): Up to $310 With the $10 cash bonus using promo code APPLEINSIDER10, BuyBackWorld is currently paying out: iPhone SE: Up to $115 * MyPhones Unlimited A relatively new addition to our Apple trade-in guide, MyPhones Unlimited offers competitive prices for iPhones, iPads, Macs and Apple watches. Like Gazelle and BuyBackWorld, MyPhones Unlimited provides customers with shipping supplies and prepaid postage. And for ease of use, there aren't multiple conditions that affect the net payout. As long as your device is fully functioning with no cracks, the device is categorized as "good" with the highest cash payout. Once MyPhones Unlimited receives your trade-in (quotes are good for 14 days), payment is issued via check with a majority of customers receiving the money within 10 business days of mailing in the device. By keeping margins low and refurbishing everything in house, MyPhones Unlimited is able to offer some of the best trade-in prices on Apple products. It also pays to be an AppleInsider reader, because MyPhones Unlimited is offering AI users a $20 cash bonus on all trade-ins with coupon code appleinsider. Simply begin the quote process and enter the coupon code during checkout (please note, the code is case sensitive). On the confirmation page, you should see +$20.00 under the price in green (see below).  $20 bonus on iPhone trade-ins $20 bonus on iPad trade-ins $20 bonus on Apple Watch trade-ins 38mm Apple Watch Series 3 GPS (Stainless): Up to $160 * $20 bonus on Mac trade-ins Deals on Apple hardware AppleInsider and Apple authorized resellers are also running a handful of additional exclusive promotions this month on Apple hardware that will not only deliver the lowest prices on many of the items, but also throw in discounts on AppleCare, software and accessories. These deals are as follows: See if there is a Mac, iPad, Apple Watch or Certified Used iPhone deal that will save you $100s by checking out prices.appleinsider.com and deals.appleinsider.com.</span> |
| Shadow of the Tomb Raider: The Kotaku Review Posted: 10 Sep 2018 06:03 AM PDT The new Tomb Raider’s freshest idea is the floating of a question: What if all this tomb raiding that Lara Croft does indicates that she is a treasure-plundering jerk who wrecks other people’s cultures and, worse, their lives? Despite the navel-gazing self-reflection that question implies, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is not a dreary buzzkill. It’s fun and beautiful and is a lengthy adventure full of enjoyable Tomb Raidery things. It’s built on the sturdy traditions of the 22-year-old franchise and uses most of the same smart systems for exploration and combat that were introduced in 2013’s Tomb Raider reboot and refined in 2015’s Rise of the Tomb Raider. Once more you make your way into an exotic location, climbing and puzzle-solving your way through tombs, ruins, and enemy installations. Once more you engage in a combination of platforming, puzzle-solving, exploration, and combat, usually sneaking around with a bow and arrow before alerting a guard and transitioning into outright gunplay. Once more you gradually level up Lara Croft as you attain more experience points and virtual gold to spend on new skills, outfits and weapons. But maybe, this sequel invites players to ponder, all this snatching of other cultures’ hidden artifacts isn’t the most enlightened cause. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Lara Croft ventures from Mexico into the jungles of Peru to outrace a fanatical Christian militia called Trinity in a quest to get some artifacts that could trigger the end of the world. Trinity, an evil and well-armed secret society, are the primary bad guys in the franchise’s new chronology, which started with the 2013 reboot. Croft’s excesses in chasing down buried treasures are often motivated by the fact that they, too, are hunting the thing in question, often with plans to use it to nefarious ends. The fact remains that at the start of the game, Croft snatches a precious item from a tomb and sets loose a cataclysm of death. Her best friend, Jonah, attempts to reassure her that it isn’t her fault, but his words ring false. The fact remains that when Lara Croft drops into town, things break. Hell, half the time she’s the one swinging the hand axe. The question of Croft’s moral legacy is floated throughout much of the game, mostly in cutscenes. It also arises in the many conversations she can have with the ordinary civilians whose villages and hidden cities have the mixed fortune of being on the dotted path toward her next desired treasure. It’s unusual enough that the game fills its world with people to talk to, greatly expanding players’ opportunities to take a break from jungle exploration by heading into town and prompting scripted conversations. It’s even more striking that some of these people, and Croft herself, express some doubts about the virtue of her trade. “It’s a shame you’re not a tourist,” Croft is told early on by a woman in a small Peruvian town that has already been ravaged by an oil-drilling company. “Tourists bring money. Archaeologists just take.” Later in the game, Croft travels deeper into the jungle and discovers a small city called Paititi, which is full of people with their own problems and possibilities. By that point she seems to have grown more aware of her potential for causing collateral damage. “I didn’t foresee any of this,” she says. “I was expecting an ancient place—artifacts, tombs—I just failed to imagine… people. I was so focused on the trail of clues I didn’t even stop to wonder. I didn’t mean to interfere... but Trinity is here.”  The abundance of ordinary people along Lara Croft’s latest trek makes the difference in this game, compared with its predecessors. There are stretches of Shadow of the Tomb Raider where Croft explores Peruvian jungle on her own, plunging into tombs and crypts and swinging through some of the most lushly rendered video game landscapes I’ve ever seen. Those stretches will feel most familiar to those who have played the preceding games, but Shadow starts to establish its own identity when Croft arrives in town and starts chatting with the locals. In the impressive, massive hub area of Paititi there are farmers and housewives, shamans and merchants, rebel leaders and children, each with stories to tell. Few of these people are hostile to this white British lady who has walked out of the foliage with a gun on her hip. Some are at least wary, some skeptical. Many are also eager to share their own hopes and stresses. With the press of a button, players can hear them out and maybe lend a hand. All of this chit-chat isn’t required to play the game. It’s optional and serves as a subtle representation of how little it is necessary in real or virtual life to listen or understand before grabbing the thing you want. The creators of Shadow of the Tomb Raider have beefed up systems for conversation and offer a slew of mostly non-violent side-quests involving townspeople but leave them skippable by those who wish to focus on plunging into tombs, shooting the paramilitary bad guys and following the game’s main story through. Players who do only those things, however, will miss experiencing a Lara Croft who is more of a listener and helper, who conceivably can get as much out of hearing a stranger’s story as she could finding some buried bauble. There are at least a few hours of this extra stuff, some of it spread across 13 optional sidequests that provide many of Shadow’s best moments, at least for those who will be satisfied with well-written character interaction. A late-game conversation with a blind man provides some particularly elegant insight into Croft’s character and is also entirely missable.  For those skipping the civilian interactions, or even for those who don’t, the good news is that the jungle gym of Shadow of the Tomb Raider is largely a step up from the already superbly enjoyable Rise. There are a few more tombs in this one, more explorable crypts, tougher puzzles, extended underwater sequences and even some improved stealth combat options utilized for what seems to be a welcome, slight reduction of combat in favor of more classic exploration. Players who went through 2015’s Rise of the Tomb Raider will find a lot of familiar material in Shadow. The plot is a continuation, as Trinity and its leaders have now been hounding Croft across multiple games, and in the last one were revealed to be responsible for her father’s death. Croft’s moveset is mostly the same as it was in the last game, though Shadow respects veteran players’ time and doesn’t force them to re-acquire returning techniques, such as shooting an arrow across a gap to form a zipline. Old traversal moves are there from the start, though very few new ones are added in the course of the game. The design structure is also the same: players progress through a series of adjacent regions filled with lore, loot, story missions and optional tombs, and can still save and fast-travel via dozens of basecamps. Some of these similarities may be due to the fact that Shadow was not made by the main Tomb Raider team at Crystal Dynamics. While that studio aided development, this new game was largely developed by Eidos Montreal. The game’s scale and level of detail don’t make it feel like a lazy production or a carbon copy, but it’s clearly built on an existing foundation, and it rarely strays too far from what’s already been established. The game distinguishes itself from the two before it by being more focused on interactions between Lara Croft and other people, by upping the count of lore, tombs, and crypts and by being set in Peru, though the jungle setting proves to be a minor liability. Its scenery is gorgeous, but Shadow of the Tomb Raider is nevertheless yet another action adventure set in a jungle, with shades of multiple Tomb Raider and Uncharted games before it. This game’s tombs, while sufficiently head-scratching, especially with hints turned off, generally lack the architectural flair that could make them especially memorable. The tropical setting doesn’t ultimately lend itself to the aesthetic distinction and geographical ingenuity of Rise of the Tomb Raider’s less commonly explored Siberia. There’s no tomb in Shadow half as striking as Rise’s ship trapped in a frozen waterfall. More than its predecessors and similar adventures, Shadow Of The Tomb Raider is what players make of it. In addition to its wealth of optional, character-redefining side conversations and side adventures, Shadow enables players unusually granular control of how difficult the game is and how much careful observation and exploration is required to progress. Players can tweak three sliders of game difficulty. They affect the toughness of combat against enemies, the amount of hints given by the game when Croft is trying to solve a tomb’s puzzles, and the extent to which the game’s environment is colored with hints about which ledges and tree branches can be used for climbing. That last one is a revelation, removing the road signs that often make traversal in action-adventure games like this an act of following directions instead of observant exploration. Players who remove traversal hints and the game’s other aids will wind up being forced to pay more careful attention to their surroundings, looking and understanding rather than just barrelling through. (For even more immersion, players can switch the default language of many supporting characters from English to their native tongue, be it Spanish, Yucatec Mayan or Nahuatl.) When the game’s difficulty sliders are set to medium or low, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a big-budget thrill ride. It flies by in a blur of cliffs to climb, chasms to cross, levers to pull, and death traps to avoid, along with a slew of high-speed action sequences involving outrunning and out-climbing bad guys or natural disasters. Played on a higher combination of difficulty settings, everything comes into sharper focus. That’s usually to the game’s benefit. It transforms from a passing diversion into a welcome test of wits and navigation, set amid a visually stunning environment that has you swinging around mountains, diving through underground rivers and clinging to muddy walls in order to silently spring upon passing militiamen. A higher difficulty improves the game’s exploration and combat. Puzzle-filled tombs become chambers where you have to scrutinize every crack to figure out how to advance. You can no longer assume Croft will mutter hints about the solution if you are stumped for too long. Combat isn’t that challenging even when dialed up but, at least at higher difficulties, it requires careful use of stealth and pushes the player to experiment with many of Croft’s dozens of unlockable character skills. Unlike other recent Tomb Raiders, encounters with human enemies are blissfully rare. The more common foe is the wild Peruvian environment, which includes more aggressive animals. You can upgrade your bow and your guns, but, fair warning, arrows and bullets don’t help with piranhas. Slowing down to play the game in a more careful, methodical way supports the idea of a Lara Croft who is becoming aware of how much she tramples when she goes tomb raiding. It is, of course, still a game, though, with no real stakes in terms of wrecking real cultures. No matter how players roleplay Lara Croft to be a more sensitive adventurer, a lot of the most thoughtful elements of the game are weakened by the gravitational pull of traditional big-budget video game stuff. Many of the aforementioned conversations with civilians, for example, produce new icons on the map. The reward for listening to someone isn’t really their story, it’s the identification of something new to track down. Even non-violent sidequests about helping people lead to unlocks of new weapons or, in one weird case after an older woman earnestly shares some life philosophy with Croft, the discovery that she’s a high-level merchant. Press a button to see what she’s selling: oh, just a machine gun, a laser sight, some gear and some ammo. She didn’t seem the type. And for all the sensitivity the game’s writing may instill about the nature of spelunking into some other country’s caves, the game sure is filled with tombs littered with loot that is all too easy and tempting to pick up. Here’s an offering table partway through a tomb. There’s a pile of jade on it. Should you press a button to pick it up so it can be sold to a merchant for better outfits that have gameplay-beneficial perks? Who can resist? That seems to be the best way to proceed and win. This is the pitfall of making a game that questions the morality of raiding tombs while still being a game about raiding tombs. At least they raised some questions, though, and give players some leeway to roleplay. Shadow of the Tomb Raider begins with a powerful proposition that Lara Croft should feel guilty about the kinds of things she does, and the unintended impact she has on innocent people’s lives. This unconventional beginning sets up an adventure that crawls and leaps and dives in many fun and interesting ways. It eventually spills into a more conventional second half that feels like it could be the climax to any Tomb Raider game, dropping any second-guessing of Croft’s mission while providing some exciting final scenes. That part is good too, just not as unusual and against type. For all its adherence to series dogma, a good chunk of Shadow of the Tomb Raider feels improbably fresh. Amid a familiar setting and familiar mechanics, it invites players to explore a familiar sort of story in a different, more thoughtful way. It makes a difference if you listen to people, especially when they’re speaking their own language. It makes a difference if you care about their stories. In this Tomb Raider, Lara Croft again shows signs of renewal, not as the gritty survivor we met in 2013, but as a more complex character who actually talks to the people she meets on her travels and understands the gravity of her actions. Many come to Tomb Raider games for adventure and escape, to visit beautiful places and solve befuddling puzzles. There’s plenty of that in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, too. It all depends on how much, or how little, you want to dig and how much you want to play as Lara Croft. |
| Apple's upcoming iPad Pro rumored to switch from Lightning to USB-C Posted: 10 Sep 2018 08:25 AM PDT  Aside from slimming down its display bezels and adding Face ID, Apple's next iPad Pro could be making a major I/O change. As noted by 9to5Mac, reliable analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says that the next high-end version of the tablet will switch over to USB Type-C. Now, it seems pretty hard to believe that Apple would already start moving away from its own Lightning connector in 2018; my first instinct was that this report simply means they'll be including a Lightning-to-USB-C cable and USB-C charger in the box. Frankly, that's what I'd still bet on. We're getting closer to this device's announcement and this move to USB-C hasn't been reported previously. But Kuo specifies that it's the entire I/O that's changing, and his reputation speaks for itself. Bluetooth aside, if the headphone jack is going away (as has also been rumored), we're really going to have to depend on USB-C headphones? Or USB-C headphone adapters? I've already lamented that taking away the headphone jack will really be a headache and unnecessary frustration for musicians. Throwing USB-C in the mix, while clearly putting the iPad on track to become more of a future-proofed computer, seems like a lot of change for one generation. As part of the shift, Kuo predicts that the iPad Pro will ship with an 18W charger in the box. Apple could unveil the new, redesigned iPad Pro at its iPhone event this week, but it seems just as likely that the company will hold it back for another event or announcement in October; Wednesday is already looking pretty loaded with three iPhones and an all-new Apple Watch design to go over. iPhone XR? Speaking of those new iPhones, Kuo says that the 6.1-inch LCD iPhone is could launch slightly later than the OLED models in "late Sep/early Oct due to quality issues of assembly and display." In a separate report today, Bloomberg claims Apple has considered branding this iPhone as the "iPhone XR." What does that even mean? If true, we'll soon have — in order of highest pricing to lowest — the iPhone XS Max, the iPhone XS, and the iPhone XR. It's worth noting that iPhone XC has also been tossed around as a possible name for the lower-priced LCD model. New low-cost MacBook, Apple Watch, etc. To round out his latest predictions, Kuo says Apple might give the new entry-level MacBook a Touch ID sensor without also adding a Touch Bar to go with it. And the Apple Watch Series 4 will supposedly gain electrocardiography (ECG) and include ceramic back covers on all models. |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Technology - Google News. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |
This post have 0 komentar
EmoticonEmoticon