Thanks to our friends at ecoATM, we were able to gather some really interesting statistics about people’s trade-in/recycling behaviors after the iPhone 6’s launch. ecoATM is a company that owns and operates 1,100 machines across the United States that allow people to trade in their electronics and have them recycles for an instantaneous cash payout. ecoATM has been in this business for quite some time so they have experience with new product launches and sudden jumps in trade-ins.

As such, it comes as no surprise that they have some really interesting data about the iPhone 6 launch’s impact on iPhone trade-ins nationwide. Thanks to their data, we can see exactly what people are upgrading from as well as what kinds of devices are being replaced the most by iPhone 6s and 6 pluses.

So, what do these colored dots translate to? What do the blue (light), green (medium), light green (high) and orange (enormous) demand dots come down to?

EcoATM Trade-in Map

Since the iPhone 6 and 6 plus became available, ecoATM saw an increase of 80% on iPhone-related activity across their entire network of kiosks. And specifically in California, trade-ins were up 104% and in Texas 92%. EcoATM says that they normally expect such jumps in these areas because these regions are populated with plenty of techies. They did, however, discover some outliers including Tennessee, which saw an increase of 195% and Massachusetts with an increase of 168%. When looking at the map, it does seem a bit odd that the Tennessee/Kentucky/Ohio area is so dense with trade-in activity but the stats don’t lie. They also saw New York increase 92%, like Texas, which isn’t surprising considering how many iPhone users live in New York City alone.

In addition to actual iPhone trade-in’s ecoATM’s own site saw a huge amount of increase interest in their phone recycling for cash kiosks. Their website has seen a 200% increase in sessions since the launch as well as their kiosk locator page saw an increase of 250% during the same period since the launch.

People were also checking the prices of specific devices before they went to the ecoATM Kiosks (which you can do here)

The iPhone 5S saw an increase of 205% of inquiries, the iPhone 5C saw an increase of 110% and the iPhone 5 saw an increase of a whopping 480%. Clearly, you can tell that the majority of people looking to upgrade to the iPhone 6 are people with iPhone 5’s which makes sense since that would have been 2 years ago when people first signed their new 2-year contracts. Additionally, the iPhone 4S saw an increase of 100% in inquiries and the iPhone 4 saw a pretty sizable 240% increase as well.

But Apple’s iPhones weren’t the only devices that started to get more trade-in interest, there was plenty of interest in trading-in Samsung devices as well. The fairly new Samsung Galaxy S5 actually saw an increase of 77% in inquiries while the Galaxy S4 saw the biggest increase among Samsung devices with a 110% increase. The Galaxy S3 saw an increase of 63% and all Galaxy Notes (Note, Note 2, and Note 3) saw an increase of 93% in inquiries.

Overall, if you take all of this trade-in data into consideration it really seems like the iPhone 5 was the primary device that people were looking to replace with an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus, which admittedly isn’t very surprising. What may actually be more interesting is the regional increases, especially in Tennessee. Either way, there is a lot of very good data about the needs and wants of iPhone users and it really looks like a lot of people buying the iPhone 6 were already iPhone users and many of them were very likely iPhone 5 users too.

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Ever wonder what people in other countries are paying for their shiny new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 pluses? Well, we’ve decided to look into the current Apple  listed prices for officially launched (or about to launch) countries in Europe, Asia and North America.

Last time we looked at iPhone prices was with the iPhone 5S and by that point there were already dozens of countries launched. So, this time it was decided to start from the beginning and to continue to follow the market as it moves forward. There have already been reports of iPhones selling for over $1,500 in some markets, but the majority of those are grey market iPhones and can effectively be sold at any price that someone is willing to pay. Those prices do not officially reflect Apple’s own pricing or MSRP that they recommend to carriers.  Even so, there are some pretty outrageously high prices coming straight from Apple’s own site.

iPhone6 Pricing

The prices as you can see above are specifically organized using Apple’s own iPhone 6 prices listed on the various regional sub-pages. The countries listed above are in order of lowest iPhone 6 Prices in blue and iPhone 6 Plus prices in orange. The iPhone 6 Plus prices actually vary from country to country with some actually costing more than in certain countries where the iPhone 6 is more expensive. This very likely has to do with how Apple structures the price differences between the two devices as well as how the local currency is converted to US dollars. All currencies have been converted to US Dollars in order to make the comparison easier for a table like the one above.

For example, the iPhone 6 is $898.49 in Denmark, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Netherlands, Austria, Portugal and Finland. This is why there is a flat line in the graph, they all have their prices in Euros and have the exact same price in terms of Euros. All other countries have their prices in different currencies and some even have slightly different taxes. The difference in taxes or other external factors are why Italy and France nearly top the list for iPhone prices because they use the Euro but have higher prices than the rest of Europe. However, Turkey still wins when compared to the rest of the world (at this given moment) with an iPhone price of $1,049.20 and an iPhone 6 Plus price of $1,182.20. That’s a solid $500 more for the iPhone 6 in Turkey than in the US for the exact same product.

Some interesting surprises were that the UAE’s prices were so close to the US market’s when adjusted for currency prices and that overall APAC (Asia Pacific) pays less than Europe and South America for iPhones. Additionally, Japan surprises with the lowest prices of all the countries in the world, even the US, very likely due to the US dollar to Yen conversion rate being at its lowest in years. Some other historically expensive markets will very likely beat these iPhone 6 prices in the future, like Brazil and Jordan, but Apple is not officially selling the iPhone 6 there yet. In fact, the Foxconn factory in Brazil where the iPhone is made for the Brazilian was on strike for 5 days earlier this month and may have affected the release date and final price of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. We will revisit the iPhone 6 Prices and the iPhone 6 Plus prices as Apple rolls out the rest of the world’s markets where iPhones are wanted. Right now, there is supposedly a very large grey market for iPhone 6s in China where it can already be purchased in Hong Kong, just across the border.

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As we had reported, Adobe had said they would be making a plethora of updates to Creative Cloud for 2014 today. Most of the improvements to Creative Cloud that have been noted by Adobe have come to their most popular product, Adobe Photoshop CC. The major new features are, Blur Gallery which allows you to create motion blur effects in images, Perspective Wrap, which fluidly adjusts the perspective of a specific part of an image without affecting the surrounding area. They’ve also included Focus Mask which makes portraits with shallow depth of field stand out even more. We’ve got a video below from Adobe that explains how it works.

There is also improved and added Content-Aware capabilities making one of the most popular features even better (I personally use content-aware autofill quite often and it only seems to get better). There will also be additions made to Lightroom 5.5 for Creative Cloud, with additional camera support, which isn’t really much of an improvement. It would be nice to see more synergy between Lightroom and Photoshop, but we’ll still have to deal with what we’ve got for now.

Adobe Illustrator CC also has a ton of improvements which include Live Shapes which allows for the fast and non-destructive manipulation of rectangles into complex forms with a quick and easy way to return the original shape in just a few clicks. There are also major improvements to Adobe InDesign CC  as well as Adobe Muse CC as a native 64-bit application and it now includes HiDPI display support for sharper-looking images, objects, and text. This is something that Adobe needs to consider for Photoshop CC as well because currently using Adobe applications on high resolution displays is a bit more than painful with tiny menu buttons, especially on HiDPI touch screens.

Adobe also introduced new Adobe Creative Cloud mobile apps with Adobe Sketch, Adobe Line, Adobe Photoshop Mix and Adobe Lightroom for mobile for iPhone. Adobe Sketch is Adobe’s ‘social’ sketching iPad app for free-form drawing, creating a new and better drawing experience for iPad users, even though drawing on an iPad isn’t as good as on other tablets. Adobe Line is, according to Adobe, the world’s first iPad app for precision drawing and drafting, even though it is questionable how accurate the iPad is for ‘precision drawing and drafting’. Adobe also introduced Adobe Photoshop Mix which is designed to bring creative imaging tools from the desktop version of Photoshop to the iPad. Because of this, Adobe has added the most popular Adobe Photoshop features to Adobe Photoshop Mix with precise compositing and masking as well as Upright, Content Aware Fill and Camera Shake Reduction. All of those features also integrate back into Photoshop CC on the desktop, making final edits on a computer much easier. Adobe has also introduced Adobe Lightroom for iPhone which is supposed to help with iPhone and iPad integration with Lightroom images on the desktop and vice versa, but realistically it will mostly be for viewing DSLR images on an iPad. The truth is that Adobe Lightroom’s primary use is for RAW images, which the iPhone currently does not support (yet) but may support with the iPhone 6 which could be the explanation of this feature launching now,  ahead of the iPhone 6’s launch. They also call it Lightroom Mobile which means we’ll likely see an Android update come out eventually, even though iOS support appears to be the first and foremost release.

Adobe Creative Cloud Ink and Slide

Also, as Adobe promised, they did introduce new hardware, even though it may be a bit underwhelming in terms of what one would expect Adobe to release. Adobe introduced their Adobe Ink and Slide hardware which are targeted towards the iPad and to bring precision drawing and drafting to the iPad combined with cloud features that the platform simply didn’t have available to it in the past. The Adobe Ink and Slide combination of hardware will cost you $199 and is really designed only for mobile use, which makes it slightly less attractive to most since it only works on an iPad. I don’t know how many serious artists use their iPads for creative work, but it may be that Apple and Adobe are trying to change that with the Ink and Slide, formerly known as Project Mighty and Project Napoleon. Either way, it will allow for more precise work to be done on iPads, even though I’m not entirely sure there is a huge market for that.

Adobe also extended their Creative Cloud Photography plan which includes Adobe Photoshop CC and Lightroom for $9.99 a month, making it the most affordable Adobe Creative Cloud option and the best value as well. If Adobe could convert all of their customers to their $9.99 Photography plan, I think they could probably keep it at $9.99 and not worry about piracy because $9.99 is just so incredibly reasonable. Even though, you simply will have no choice but to pay for CC in the future as CS6 becomes more and more outdated.

Overall, Adobe’s Creative Cloud update for 2014 isn’t necessarily a bad one, it improves the company’s software stack across the board and strengthens their mobile presence, even if its almost entirely on iOS. It will be interesting to see if any of their new mobile features will become more relevant with the new iPhone 6 and iOS 8.

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We don’t normally post iPhone rumors unless they’re incredibly well substantiated and this one appears to be pretty legitimate. While the source of the rumor may be one that seems a bit off-kilter, this person who we are referring to has actually proven themselves in the past to be able to get legitimate iPhone hardware ahead of the launch.

Some images from MacFixit.AU that show the new iPhone 6

There have been countless rumors and leaks and all of the Mac and Apple fan sites will flood you with basically anything they can in order to ensure you click on it. Most of what we’ve seen online as of late has all culminated in Apple launching a larger iPhone. This addresses one of the biggest problems that people have had with the iPhone stating that it is simply too small for most people, causing many to go in search of Android devices with bigger screens. And most of the Android manufacturers have satisfied these needs by launching 5″, 5.5″ and 6″ phones (if you can call them phones past 5″). However, there are still a lot of people that like the small size of the iPhone and how comfortably it fits in their hands (especially if they have smaller hands). So, there is a very strong belief that the iPhone 6 will come in two sizes, one to satisfy the people wanting a bigger screen and another to keep the small phone people happy. There haven’t actually been any rumors that fully substantiate this possibility yet, but it would be a sound business decision on Apple’s part. Almost all of the leaked photos and videos about the new iPhone 6 basically show the newer larger design, which frankly bears a striking resemblance to the HTC One and HTC One M8 both of which we reviewed. Now, there have been a lot of leaks, like we stated earlier but not many of them had a confirming or solid source to verify the look or design, until now. A Taiwanese actor, famous for having shown himself with an iPhone 5C well in advance of the phone’s launch has once again posed with a new Apple iPhone, but this time it’s the iPhone 6 and he’s got it in hand next to an iPhone 5S. Thanks to the website SteveNotes.hk, we’ve got images of Jimmy Lin with the new iPhone 6 along with the iPhone 5S next to it for size.

As you can see from the Weibo image above, the new iPhone 6 (or whatever it’ll be called) is a larger phone than the iPhone 5S and has much more rounded edges which should make it feel much more comfortable in the hand than the somewhat sharp iPhone 5/S. There are also multiple sources claiming that this phone will have a 2K (2560 x 1440 ish) display, even though I’m not sure that this phone is large enough or there is a display small enough to fit in an iPhone and deliver that resolution. Keep in mind that the current iPhone 5S is 1136 x 640 resolution on a 4″ display and a 2K resolution would be more than quadrupling that in terms of pixels if they were to go 2K. The likelihood for that happening is VERY VERY low, so more realistically, we’ll finally see Apple move towards a more standard resolution like 1920 x 1080 or pretty close to it since Apple decided to stay away from 720P with their 1136 x 640 resolution on the iPhone 5.

The expected timeframe for this phone is still fall of this year, likely with a September announcement and an October or late September launch (like last year).

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