The big surprise out of Cupertino earlier this week: Apple’s new flagship phone, the iPhone 11 ($500 at Best Buy), would not have a starting price of $1,000, or $900 or even $800. Nope, it starts at $699 — and thanks to Apple’s aggressive new trade-in program, you might be able to snag it for …

Last month, Microsoft sent out invites to a Surface event set for Oct. 2 in New York City. That’s exactly one year after the company’s last Surface event, where it updated its line of Surface PCs and launched its first high-end noise-canceling headphones. The Microsoft invite didn’t offer many clues on what to expect from the event. Beyond the date and location, …

Spotify knows a lot about its users — their musical tastes, their most listened-to artists and their summer anthems. Spotify will also want to know where you live or to obtain your location data. It’s part of an effort to detect fraud and abuse of its Premium Family program.  Premium Family is a $15-a-month plan for up to six people. …

Walgreens is giving customers an incentive to use their Apple Cards. Customers using Apple Card with Apple Pay to buy prescriptions, medicines and beauty, personal care, household and seasonal products, will get back 3% Daily Cash, Walgreens said Thursday. Daily Cash is Apple Card’s rewards program that promises a percentage of cash back on purchases.  Read: Apple Card vs. Amazon Prime Rewards …

Google has tweaked its search engine to make sure users searching for news are served more varieties across news for a longer amount of time. The updates will “elevate original reporting,” a Google executive said in a Thursday blog post. The search giant wants to “provide people with a deeper understanding of their changing communities and the conversations going on …

Patreon, which gives fans a way to pay their favorite creators on a recurring basis, is selling the merchandise-distribution startup Kit that it acquired last year. Geniuslink, a tech company that offers link shortening for marketing products, is the buyer.  Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.  “When the Kit team was acquired by Patreon last year, we shared our …

Google on Thursday outlined updates to its ARCore platform, which lets developers build augmented reality experiences for your phone. The search giant also previewed a feature it’s describing as a “save button” for AR. Google said it’s looking for more developers to help it test an AR technology called persistent Cloud Anchors before the company makes it available more broadly. …

I see a little black square held up in front of me. It looks like nothing, just a lump of black plastic with a row of gold contact pins on the bottom. It could be a little memory stick. Or maybe a garage door opener. It’s surprisingly nondescript. This is the new Jacquard Tag. What Google’s showing me is the …

Google is giving Photos an update to help make it easier to find past photos in the app and share those moments with or without a phone. The new first of the new features, Memories, is designed to fight the problem of sorting through hundreds or thousands of photos. Using Google’s machine learning, the Photos app will now create a …

Apple’s competitors aren’t going to sit idly by while you gaze longingly at the new iPhones released yesterday. Microsoft is hoping to catch you before you order an iPhone 11 or iPhone 11 Pro with a tempting trade-in offer that can put a big hole in the price of a new Samsung Galaxy Note 10 or Galaxy Note 10 Plus. You can …