Weekend Wrap-Up: Apple Unveils New Products; Microsoft May Purchase Minecraft
Happy Sunday, folks! We’re here, as usual, catching you up on the big tech stories from the past week.
We saw quite a bit from Apple this week, but Microsoft and Twitter made some news, as well. Let’s get to it.
Apple Holds Event, Unveils New Products
Apple held an event this past Tuesday and unveiled pretty much every product that we’d heard mentioned in the rumor mill over the past few months. Apple’s iPhone 6 bumps the smartphone’s display size up to 4.7 inches. The iPhone 6 Plus raises the bar even higher, giving users a 5.5-inch option. And then, of course, we got the Apple Watch (don’t call it an iWatch!). That device is going to do quite a bit, aside from the normal smartwatch-type things like forwarding notifications and, well, telling time. Unfortunately, no one could get hands on time with a working Apple Watch, as the company only brought non-live demo units to its event. Apple also introduced a new payment service that will work with the iPhone 6, the iPhone 6 Plus and the Apple Watch. Apple Pay, as it’s called, will let you use one of the previously-mentioned devices to pay at participating retailers using NFC. The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus will show up this Friday. The Apple watch, though, won’t arrive until 2015.
Microsoft May Buy Minecraft Creator Mojang
Minecraft has been a force to be reckoned with for the past few years, making its way onto the PC as well as many game consoles and mobile devices. And now the company behind the hit game, Mojang, may be in talks to be acquired by Microsoft. The price tag? $2 billion. The implications of a Microsoft release for Minecraft would definitely be felt in the game industry, particularly by Sony, which just got the title on its PlayStation 4 console. Would Microsoft possibly keep Minecraft off of the PS3 and PS4 systems once it becomes the sole owner of the game? That remains to be seen. We’ll keep you updated on this.
Buy From A Tweet? It Could Happen
Twitter has long been experimenting with ways to monetize its popular social network, and this past week we learned about a new idea the company is working on. On Tweets that include a purchasable product, Twitter may start adding “Buy” buttons that let you purchase right from Twitter. At this point, the implementation Twitter has going is just a test with a few retail partners. But if the test takes off and if users really take to the buttons, we might see Twitter further expand the feature to other stores.