If you’re intrigued by Apple’s latest line of refreshed MacBook Airs, you should check out what Best Buy has to offer. AppleInsider points out that Best Buy is offering the lowest prices for the newest MacBook Airs that we’ve yet seen, including $854.99 for the entry-level 11.6-inch MacBook Air that normally retails for $899, and $949.99 for the entry-level 13-inch model that normally retails for $999. Of course, the deals being offered for 2013’s MacBook Airs are even better and you can get an entry-level 11.6-inch model for just $759.99 and an entry-level 13-inch model for $854.99. Given that early benchmarks we’ve seen of the new MacBook Airs showed only a slight improvement over the 2013 MacBook Airs, then the year-old models look like much better bargains at this point. You can check out AppleInsider’s chart that documents MacBook Air prices at multiple retail outlets by clicking the source link below.

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Scientists at the University of California have come up with a nifty new way to utilize nanoparticles of gold. A solution of gold particles embedded in a polymer film creates a bright blue color, which turns red after pressure is applied on the film. The color shift correlates with the amount of pressure used — blue turns purple after moderate impact and red with a hard hit. This nuanced response yields information about different pressure levels the gold film encounters. The possibilities seem limitless, from sports to scientific studies to fashion.

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Amazon is ready to offer shoppers an interesting new way to purchase various goods by letting them connect their Amazon and Twitter accounts in order to add new products to their Amazon shopping carts with a simple hashtag. By adding #AmazonCart in replies to tweets that have Amazon product links in them, users will be able to add those products to their carts, The Next Web reports.

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As ZDNet reports, some recent LinkedIn profile updates indicate that Apple has hired biomedical engineers from companies including Vital Connect, Sano Intelligence, O2 Medtech and Masimo. These companies manufacture devices that monitor respiratory functions, heart rate and body temperature. What might the biomedical monitoring functions of iWatch mean for the regular consumer? Many of the companies Apple seems to be hiring from have far broader and deeper goals than telling people what their heart rate is.

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Microsoft is apparently looking for a Senior Software Development Engineer to help it further boost the performance of both its new Xbox One console and the older Xbox 360 model, GamingBolt reveals, speculating that the company wants to further improve and optimize the performance of the consoles’ processors.

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It’s amazing what a strong earnings report and a 7-for-1 stock split will do for your company’s share price. Apple shares surged past the $600 mark on Monday and closed at $600.96 each, which is the highest they’ve been since November 2012. Apple’s stock value had peaked at around $700 in September 2012 before falling all the way down to under $400 in April 2013. However, the company’s better-than-expected iPhone sales in its latest quarterly earnings report coupled with news that it will enact a 7-for-1 stock split in early June have helped reignite demand for Apple’s stock. Investors may also be feeling bullish at the sales prospects of the iPhone 6, which will finally give Apple fans a device with a big display that’s on par with the Galaxy S5.

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You might want to hold off on sending sensitive attachments through your iPhone or iPad if it runs on iOS 7 or higher. 9to5Mac draws our attention to a recent post from German security researcher Andreas Kurtz, who claims that encryption for email attachments has been disabled on iOS versions 7 and higher, even the recently released iOS 7.1.1 that was issued specifically to fix security flaws. Kurtz says that he reported the problem to Apple, which supposedly acknowledged it but didn’t give a timeline for when a fix would be released. As 9to5Mac says, this is obviously a potential problem because Apple touts iOS 7 as providing encryption for email attachments and many users have likely been sending important files through email under the assumption that they’d be encrypted.

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PlayStation Now hasn’t received much fanfare since its reveal in January. Despite the implications of on-demand console gaming without hard drive space concerns or huge downloads, the anticipated feature has been put on the back burner as new game releases take precedence. PlayStation Now is still only accessible to a select group of beta testers, but one of those testers has gone out of the way to leak a video showcasing the service that Sony plans to introduce later this year. We’ve seen leaked footage of PlayStation Now before, but never as clear as this.

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Among the many impressive new features that HTC added with the HTC One (M8) was new “Motion Launch” functionality that gives you much more control over your device using simple gestures, such as the ability to both wake it up and put it back to sleep by double-tapping the display. Unfortunately, the only way to get this incredibly cool feature so far has been to buy an HTC One (M8)… until now, that is.

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