It’s Sunday again, meaning it’s time we chose this week’s winner and loser.
It’s been a relatively quiet one this week, with the biggest news being Elon Musk’s bid to buy Twitter. Other news included an incredibly thin 5G phone from Motorola, a green tartan Xbox controller and rumours surrounding the Apple M3 chip and the highly-anticipated Pixel Watch.
Read on to discover who we crowned our winner and loser this week…
Winner: Snap
Snap had plenty to discuss at its fourth annual Partner Summit this week, but nothing quite caught our attention like Pixy, the camera company and Snapchat creator’s latest attempt at taking social media photography beyond our smartphones.
Pixy is essentially a pocket-sized drone designed to work with the Snap camera. It can float, orbit and follow where you lead with four preset flight paths controlled with a tap in the Snap app, meaning there’s no controller to lug around.
Any videos captured with Snap are wirelessly saved into your Snapchat Memories, where you can go on to edit them. Once you’re done, Pixy will land neatly in your hand.
Pixy costs $229.99 (around £183) and is only available in the US and France at the moment, but the bright little drone is a prime example of Snap’s out-of-the-box thinking that sets it apart from other photo and video sharing apps.
That said, its Spectacles wearable didn’t exactly catch on when they launched back in 2016. We’ll have to wait and see whether Pixy is enough to put Snapchat back on top.
Loser: Apple
Last November, Apple revealed that it would be launching its own self-repair service, allowing iOS users to fix their own iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 handsets at home.
This week, Self Service Repair went live, causing us to gawk at the prices Apple is charging for a repair bundle and tool kit rental.
You might assume you’d save some cash by DIY-ing your phone repair, but the savings are surprisingly minimal.
As our writer Chris Smith calculated when the prices were revealed, a display repair bundle for the iPhone 12 is $269 – just $10 less than asking Apple to fix your out of warranty phone for you.
That isn’t even considering the $49 rental fee Apple charges for its tool kit if you don’t have all the equipment you need at home.
While we’re happy Apple is giving users the option to repair their devices without voiding their warranty, the high price of the self repair kits means it sadly remains easier for most users to pass their phones over to an expert than try to fix it at home and risk damaging their phones further.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.