Apple unveils new MacBook Air with Retina Display

Apple's second fall event focused on product categories that were languishing and in dire need of a refresh. The MacBook Air is Apple's most popular Mac and beloved by students, writers and office workers everywhere and now there's a new version. 

The latest 13-inch MacBook Air now features a Retina Display, powerful 8th generation Intel Core i5 processors, Intel UHD Graphics and faster 2133 MHz system memory up to 16GB. SSDs are now available up to 1Terabyte although the base model still ships with a rather stingy 128 GB of SSD storage and starts at CAD $ 1,199.00.

Other notable upgrades include the inclusion of Touch ID for fingerprint recognition, dual Thunderbolt ports in USB Type-C standard, Apple's T2 security chip and most importantly, the new MacBook Air features a13.3-inch Retina display with over 4 million pixels of resolution with 48 percent more colour than the previous generation, images are more lifelike than ever. MacBook Air is available for preorder on Apple.ca and will ship November 7.

IBM acquires open source software maker Red Hat for $35 billion

Considered to be the largest acquisition of a software company, IBM has just bought open source and Linux pioneering company Red Hat for US $35 billion. This deal will result in a merger propels IBM as an enterprise cloud computing provider. Now facing off against Amazon's AWS and Microsoft's Azure Cloud, IBM says that its services will allow more businesses to shift their operations online, and that the proprietary nature of existing cloud systems means that it’s harder to move and secure data from system to system.

Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst sharedthe following, "we have barely scratched the surface of the opportunity that is ahead of us. Open source is the future of enterprise IT. We believe our total addressable market to be $73 billion by 2021. If software is eating the world - and with digital transformation occurring across industries, it truly is - open source is the key ingredient. Powered by IBM, we can dramatically scale and accelerate what we are doing today. Imagine Red Hat with greater resources to grow into the opportunity ahead of us."

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Netflix's 'The Chilling adventures of Sabrina' strikes the middle ground between teen drama and horror series

Netflix's The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is the second series following Riverdale which uses the characters and mythology from the Archie comics. Like Riverdale, which has recently taken on a very dark and very gritty True Detective meets Midnight Express turn, Sabrina Spellman's world, is similarly explicit in its exploration of horror themes.

The series, which debuted at midnight last night (Witching Hour, get it?) Is like Mean Girls with covens and demons instead of diabolical debutantes. Kiernan Shipka (Mad Men) embodies the chaste yet defiant Sabrina Spellman, who upon turning 16, must sign her name to the dark forces and let go of all her mortal friends and connections.

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First impressions of the iPhone XR

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

It might be easy to overlook Apple's third iPhone release for 2018, the colourful iPhone XR in the wake of the popular and luxurious iPhone XS and the large and lavish iPhone XS Max. The truth is that the iPhone XR is possibly the most interesting iPhone release in years and will appeal to the sensitivities and budgets for the most amount of users.

Apple doesn't do budget iPhones. In the past, it would simply leave the previous year's release at a lower price while it promoted the flagship devices. The iPhone 5C, was a bit of an outlier in that it offered the same iPhone experience but with cheaper materials and a range of loud and lovely colours that attracted a wide gamut of users.

The good news is that the colours are back for the iPhone Xr, which comes to stores tomorrow. Unlike the iPhone 5C the colours for iPhone XR are not a plastic polycarbonate case, but this time on a reinforced glass enclosure. iPhone XR comes in black, white, blue, yellow, coral and (PRODUCT)RED colours. The iPhone XR, with the largest LCD display Apple has ever done at 6.1-inches, is slightly larger then the iPhone XS but is still dwarfed by the statuesque iPhone XS Max.

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