It’s Sunday, which means it’s time for us to name our final winner and loser of June 2024.
This week, Motorola announced the Razr 50 and Razr 50 Ultra clamshell foldables as OnePlus unveiled the affordable Nord CE 4 Lite.
Meanwhile, Beats released a new Beats Pill speaker, Samsung confirmed the date of its next big Unpacked event and Google surprised us all by scheduling its Pixel 9 launch event for August instead of October.
Keep reading to learn who our winner and loser are this week, along with how they earned these titles.
Winner: Amazon
Amazon is our winner this week as the company revealed the date of its next big Prime Day event.
This year, the sale will run from midnight on July 16 to 23:59 on July 17, giving you two full days to grab as many bargains as you can in what is perhaps the biggest online sale outside of Black Friday.
The one caveat is that you need to be an Amazon Prime member to take advantage of the deals. Thankfully, Amazon offers a 30-day free trial, meaning you may not even need to pay to become a member for the month.
So far, Amazon has teased deals on products from Bose, Fitbit, Oral-B, Sony, Elemis, GHD, Ninja, Samsung, Barbie, L’Oréal and Shark, though these are bound to be just some of the brands you can catch a deal with this July.
Every year, we see the prices of Amazon’s own products slashed, making this the ideal time to stock up on Echo speakers, Kindles and Fire Tablets. As it stands, we’ve already spotted some early deals on Ring cameras, Amazon Music Unlimited and Audible.
July will mark the 10th anniversary of Prime Day, meaning Amazon might also have some additional plans to celebrate during the sale. However, we’ll have to wait and see whether that’s the case.
Loser: EU iPhone users
A report has claimed that users in the EU will likely miss out on key iOS 18 features, including Apple Intelligence.
Apple Intelligence is already more exclusive than we’d hoped, with only iPhone 15 Pro models supporting the advanced iOS 18 feature so far. Now, it seems even those with the phone in the EU might not receive the AI features.
According to a report by Bloomberg, the Digital Markets Act that forced Apple to allow support for third-party app stores and payment platforms could result in EU users missing out on key features, including Apple Intelligence, iPhone to Mac screen mirroring and ScreenPlay Screen Sharing.
Apple raised concerns about user privacy in a statement to Bloomberg with a spokesperson saying, “We are concerned that the interoperability requirements of the DMA could force us to compromise the integrity of our products in ways that risk user privacy and data security”.
Hopefully, this is something that Apple can find a workable solution for ahead of the iOS 18 launch this fall. If not, this will be disappointing news for many iPhone users in the EU.
