CES 2019: Acer's new Predator Triton 900 represents peak gaming notebook

Gaming notebooks are expected to be huge in 2019 and Acer has pretty much dropped the gauntlet at CES in Las Vegas with the audacious Predator Triton 900.

This is a 2-in-1 notebook built around a 4K 17-inch touch display as well as Intel’s recent hexacore 8th Gen Core i7 processors mated to Nvidia’s RTX 2080 graphics card/ Also on tap are lightning fast NVMe PCIe SSDs and up to 32GB DDR4 RAM which pushes pricing for this beast beyond its US $4,000 starting price.

Mastercard celebrates 50 years by dropping its name

Mastercard is dropping its name in select branding and becoming something more, a symbol. The company announced it is dropping its name from its iconic brand mark in select contexts. With this latest milestone in Mastercard’s rebrand, which started in 2016, the interlocking red and yellow circles will now stand on their own. 

“Reinvention in the digital age calls for modern simplicity,” said Raja Rajamannar, chief marketing and communication officer at Mastercard. “And with more than 80 percent of people spontaneously recognizing the Mastercard Symbol without the word‘mastercard,’ we felt ready to take this next step in our brand evolution. We are proud of our rich brand heritage and are excited to see the iconic circles standing on their own.”

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Apple's GarageBand app celebrates 15 years of music creation for the rest of us

John Mayer and Steve Jobs demo an earlier version of GarageBand

Apple is celebrating 15 years of Garageband, the app included in macOS which enables anyone to put together various loops and samples as well as integrate live voice or musical instrumentation. Garageband was an ambitious and successful application that was part of iLife, the suite of apps included with every Mac sold.

GarageBand brought drag and drop simplicity to music creation and added myriad options for instruments, loops, and beats which were mostly royalty free. For budding musicians or composers, it gave them the ability to put together music even without having to read notes or having access to various instruments.

The app, originally introduced onstage at Macworld '04 by Steve Jobs and John Mayer, has grown to be the most widely used music app in the world — and is now on over 1 billion iPhones, iPads and Macs globally. 

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Apple announces blockbuster holiday week with $1.22 billion in sales

Apple announced a record-breaking holiday sales week and New Year's Day with a huge $1.22 billion in sales spent in apps and games. 

"The holiday week was our biggest week ever with more than $1.22 billion spent on apps and games, and New Year’s Day set a new single-day record at more than $322 million,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “Thanks to the inspiring work of our talented developers and the support of our incredible customers around the world."

Apple says services set new all-time records in multiple categories, including the App Store, Apple Music, Cloud Services, Apple Pay and the App Store’s search ad business. Huge earners in the app department includemultiplayer games like Fortnite and PUBG as well as productivity, health and fitness apps. "1Password, Sweat and Luminosity charting in their respective categories," Apple reported.