Here are a number of news items that have been circulating over the holiday weekend:
- One story that made headlines was a report that implied that Microsoft had Silverlight working on the iPhone. Silverlight is Microsoft's Flash-competitor. The headline, however, was a bit misleading as the technology demonstrated simply involved Microsoft converting Silverlight video realtime into a format already supported by the iPhone. No actual on-iPhone software actually supported Silverlight. - Handbrake 0.9.4 - A major update to a popular Mac video encoding application was released. The latest version of Handbrake delivered improvements to H.264 encoding as well as 64-bit support. Detailed discussion of the latest build has been talking place in our forums. - ComScore released results from Black Friday's online sales and found that online spending was up 11% over the previous year with an estimated $595 Million spent. Apple.com was singled out as one of the top 5 online retailers. Apple reportedly saw traffic growth of 39% year-over-year. - CyberMonday sales have kicked in and remain summarized in our sales chart. There are still significant discounts on Macs available for today.
Apple today released a new Pride Edition Sport Loop for the Apple Watch. The band features a rainbow design with 11 colors of woven nylon yarns.
The new Pride Edition Sport Loop is available to order now on Apple.com and in the Apple Store app in 40mm, 42mm, and 46mm sizes, and it will be available at Apple Store locations starting later this week. In the U.S., the band costs $49.
There...
iOS 26.5 includes three new features for iPhones, according to Apple's release notes for the update, which is expected to be released next week.
As discovered during beta testing, iOS 26.5 enables end-to-end encryption for RCS messaging between iOS and Android devices. Apple says this security upgrade is limited to supported carriers around the world and will continue to roll out....
Instagram will remove end-to-end encryption for direct messages between users from May 8, 2026. When the date comes around, Meta will potentially be able to see the contents of all messages between users on the social media platform.
Encrypting messages has been an optional feature in Instagram since 2023, but in March of this year the social media platform quietly updated a help page to say ...
