O'Grady's PowerPage

Tag: gift cards

  • Amazon.com offers discounted MacBook Air, MacBook Pro prices for Black Friday sale

    The savings have arrived.

    Per AppleInsider, web retailer Amazon.com on Thursday cut pricing on Apple’s MacBook Air lineup and a handful of 13-inch MacBook Pros, yielding the best prices thus far on some models while matching pricing from rival retailers on others.

    For MacBook Airs, Amazon has knocked US$100 off all models with the exception of the 1.80GHz 13″ MacBook Air, which it cut by US$174 to US$1,024.99 — the best price for this model thus far. The price cuts also yield the best deals on the 2.5GHz 13″ (4GB/500GB HDD) MacBook Pro US$1,034.99 (US$164.01 in savings) and 2.9GHz 13″ (8GB/750GB HDD) MacBook Pro US$1,349.99 (US$149.01 in savings). Both these prices will best Apple’s Black Friday sale. Amazon also pays some of the highest prices (in Amazon Gift Cards) if you sell them your old Mac (compare with other trade-in services).

    So, if you don’t want to venture out there and have to use friends and relatives as shielding today, take a gander at what Amazon might have to offer.

  • British Airways confirms support for iOS Passbook feature

    If you can get the major partners, then a new technology comes closer to being a de-facto standard.

    Per AppleInsider, British Airways has confirmed that it will be supporting Apple’s Passbook payment system.

    “I’m pleased to confirm that the ba.com team are already looking into our website being able to work with the new Apple app, available with the iOS6 upgrade,” a company representative wrote in an e-mail. “Please be assured that we will get our Passbook-compatible functionality live on ba.com as soon as we can.”

    British Airways already offers digital boarding passes through its official iOS application. But the carrier does not yet offer integration with Apple’s Passbook.

    Passbook launched with iOS 6 in September featuring support from Delta Airlines, American Airlines, United Airlines and Virgin Australia.

    The addition of British Airways would be a major catch for Apple. The U.K.-based carrier has a fleet of 249 aircraft and serves 169 total destinations.

    Just this week, Apple updated its own Apple Store application for iOS to add support for Passbook. With the new software, users can purchase gift cards and e-mail them to friends, and those cards can be stored as passes in the Passbook application in iOS 6.

    Passbook is Apple’s first stab at offering digital e-wallet type services on the iPhone. Rather than relying on near-field communication technology for wireless transactions, Apple has instead focused on replacing items such as store cards, boarding passes, movie tickets and retail coupons.

    One of the first adopters of Passbook was Major League Baseball, which offered digital tickets for four teams at the end of the 2012 season. The league’s digital ticketing operation was “floored” by the initial adoption rate for Passbook, as they found Apple’s service accounted for 12 percent of MLB e-tickets.

    Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.