Apple’s App Store has hundreds of thousands of apps, but the company says it’s time to get rid of some duds. Two categories will be scrubbed from the store, the company told developers, according to a message seen by TechCrunch. First to go will be old apps that aren’t compatible with modern iPhones and iPads, …

Google gave the world a taste of Fantastica on Thursday. The Google Doodle appearing on the company’s search page pays homage to “The Neverending Story,” a fantasy book by Michael Ende published 37 years ago on September 1, 1979. In the book, a character named Bastian gets slurped into a book containing a mystical realm called Fantastica, where he meets …

Snapseed, a Google photo editor that goes beyond the basics of Google Photos, just got a little more serious. With Wednesday’s Snapseed 2.9 release for iPhones and iPads, the software now can edit raw-format photos, the pictures taken directly from a digital camera’s image sensor without any processing. Photo enthusiasts love raw photos. Although they’re more of a pain to …

They’ve been a fixture of the computing industry for 60 years, but in 2018, hard drives will be pushed aside by storage systems using memory chips in PCs, an analyst firm predicts. Hard drives revolutionized computing when IBM commercialized the first, RAMAC, in 1956. They read and write ones and zeros as tiny patches of magnetic information on rotating platters. …

Apple’s next MacBook Pro will help move us all into the future of personal computing. But it could also bring some big headaches along the way. I’m confident it’ll remain a powerful machine while getting lighter and smaller. But I’m worried that one new technology that enables that slimming down, the versatile USB Type-C port, will also mean the MacBook …

Don’t panic, Lightroom fans, Adobe Systems will support the new photo format Canon tucked into its hot new SLR, the EOS 5D Mark IV. Adobe’s Lightroom, for editing and cataloging photos, has a particular emphasis on “raw” photo formats that offer more editing flexibility and image quality than ordinary JPEG but that are more of a hassle to handle. Canon’s …

Intel’s long-running but largely unsuccessful effort to transform how you plug devices into your PC will make major progress this year and ultimately conquer much of the industry, the chipmaker predicts. Intel has promoted a connection technology called Thunderbolt for years with few signs of the mainstream success enjoyed by its chief rival, USB. At this week’s Intel Developer Forum, …

Laser light has made its way into a new product line Intel expects will speed up the data centers at the heart of online services like Google search and Facebook social networking. After years of research, the chipmaker has begun selling a product using a technology called silicon photonics that builds lasers directly into computer chips. That means communications can …

One venerable computing technology, USB, could be about to help kill off an even older standard, the 3.5mm audio jack. The 3.5mm audio jack was popularized as the way to plug headphones into Sony’s portable Walkman tape player and got a new lease on life as a way to handle audio on virtually every mobile phone and PC. But if …

Now playing: Watch this: Google’s mysterious new project, Fuchsia 1:28 Enlarge Image Google headquarters in Mountain View, California Stephen Shankland/CNET First there was Windows vs. Mac. Then came iOS vs. Android. Now with a project called Fuchsia, Google could be starting a new software platform war — but we don’t yet know who’s on the other side of the battle …