Today’s best deals include a $700 discount on the latest 15-inch MacBook Pro alongside refurbished iPhone XS/Max and more from $120. Plus, you’ll be able to score new lows in a one-day networking Gold Box. Hit the jump for all that and more in the latest 9to5Toys Lunch Break.

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Markets closed out last week on an anxious note. It's not difficult to see why: the coronavirus continues to spread, and there are signs that some of the world's top economies could slide into recession as the outbreak compounds pre-existing weaknesses. From a report: Take Japan: The world's third-largest economy shrank 1.6% in the fourth quarter of 2019 as the country absorbed the effects of a sales tax hike and a powerful typhoon. It was biggest contraction compared to the previous quarter since 2014. Then there's Germany. The biggest economy in Europe ground to a halt right before the coronavirus outbreak set in, dragged down by the country's struggling factories. The closely-watched ZEW Indicator of Economic Sentiment in Germany decreased sharply for February, reflecting fears that the virus could hit world trade. Bank of America economist Ethan Harris points to the number of smaller economies that are hurting, too. Hong Kong is in recession and Singapore could soon suffer a similar fate. Fourth quarter GDP data from Indonesia hit a three-year low, while Malaysia had its worst reading in a decade, he noted to clients on Friday. Meanwhile, engines of growth like China and India slowed in 2019. Fourth quarter GDP data for the latter comes out this week. All of this brings to the fore concerns about the global economy's ability to withstand a shock from the coronavirus. Harris says the weak quarter was likely a result of lingering damage from the trade war between China and the United States. The coronavirus is poised to make matters worse.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The decade-long legal battle between Apple and VirnetX may be coming to an end. Today the US Supreme Court rejected an appeal from Apple to hear the case in which it may end up owing VirnetX $440 million.

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Enjoy breathtaking shots of the iconic sandstone structure found in Valley of Fire State Park located in Overton, Nevada.

A series of alleged images of a 2020 iPad Pro case showcase a rounded square-shaped rear camera design.

The European Commission has told its staff to start using Signal, an end-to-end-encrypted messaging app, in a push to increase the security of its communications. From a report: The instruction appeared on internal messaging boards in early February, notifying employees that "Signal has been selected as the recommended application for public instant messaging." The app is favored by privacy activists because of its end-to-end encryption and open-source technology. "It's like Facebook's WhatsApp and Apple's iMessage but it's based on an encryption protocol that's very innovative," said Bart Preneel, cryptography expert at the University of Leuven. "Because it's open-source, you can check what's happening under the hood," he added. Signal was developed in 2013 by privacy activists. It is supported by a nonprofit foundation that has the backing of WhatsApp founder Brian Acton, who had left the company in 2017 after clashing with Facebook's leadership.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Listen to a recap of the top stories of the day from 9to5Mac. 9to5Mac Daily is available on iTunes and Apple’s Podcasts app, Stitcher, TuneIn, Google Play, or through our dedicated RSS feed for Overcast and other podcast players.

Sponsored by Hyper:  Hyper’s next-gen of USB-C Hubs is now available to preorder. Thanks to Hyper, we’re also giving 9to5Mac readers the chance to win Apple’s new Mac Pro worth $6000 this month.

https://9to5mac.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2020/02/9to5Mac-Daily-02-24-2020.mp3

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Various new Apple products could be on the horizon, if leaked images from Target's retail inventory system are to be trusted.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett has said in an interview that Apple is ‘probably the best business I know in the world.’

His Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate is now the largest single investor in AAPL, owning 5.7% of the company and ‘increasing all the time’ …

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The New York Times: They asked Katherine Johnson for the moon, and she gave it to them. Wielding little more than a pencil, a slide rule and one of the finest mathematical minds in the country, Mrs. Johnson, whose death at 101 was announced on Monday by NASA, calculated the precise trajectories that would let Apollo 11 land on the moon in 1969 and, after Neil Armstrong's history-making moonwalk, let it return to Earth. A single error, she well knew, could have dire consequences for craft and crew. Her impeccable calculations had already helped plot the successful flight of Alan B. Shepard Jr., who became the first American in space when his Mercury spacecraft went aloft in 1961. The next year, she likewise helped make it possible for John Glenn, in the Mercury vessel Friendship 7, to become the first American to orbit the Earth. Yet throughout Mrs. Johnson's 33 years in NASA's Flight Research Division -- the office from which the American space program sprang -- and for decades afterward, almost no one knew her name. Mrs. Johnson was one of several hundred rigorously educated, supremely capable yet largely unheralded women who, well before the modern feminist movement, worked as NASA mathematicians. But it was not only her sex that kept her long marginalized and long unsung: Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson, a West Virginia native who began her scientific career in the age of Jim Crow, was also African-American. In old age, Mrs. Johnson became the most celebrated of the small cadre of black women -- perhaps three dozen -- who at midcentury served as mathematicians for the space agency and its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Their story was told in the 2016 Hollywood film "Hidden Figures," based on Margot Lee Shetterly's nonfiction book of the same title, published that year. The movie starred Taraji P. Henson as Mrs. Johnson, the film's central figure. It also starred Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae as her real-life colleagues Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has announced that it’ll soon stop allowing HTTPS certificates in Safari with more than 13 months of validity.

Apple’s upcoming Tile-like tracking accessory, tentatively named “AirTag”, could feature wireless charging similar to your Apple Watch and be “completely waterproof”.... Read the rest of this post here "AirTag could charge wirelessly like Apple Watch, should be “completely waterproof”" is...

Microsoft revealed new details on its next-generation console, text, on Monday morning, confirming specifications on what the company calls its "superior balance of power and speed" for its new hardware. From a report: The next-gen Xbox, Microsoft said, will be four times as powerful as the original Xbox One. The Xbox Series X "next-generation custom processor" will employ AMD's Zen 2 and RDNA 2 architecture, head of Xbox Phil Spencer wrote on the Xbox website. "Delivering four times the processing power of an Xbox One and enabling developers to leverage 12 [teraflops] of GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) performance -- twice that of an Xbox One X and more than eight times the original Xbox One," Spencer said. He called the next-generation Xbox's processing and graphics power "a true generational leap," offering higher frame rates -- with support for up to 120 fps -- and more sophisticated game worlds. That 12 teraflops claim is twice that of what Microsoft promised with the Xbox One X (then known as Project Scorpio) when it revealed the mid-generation console update back in 2016. Spencer also outlined the Xbox Series X's variable rate shading, saying, "Rather than spending GPU cycles uniformly to every single pixel on the screen, they can prioritize individual effects on specific game characters or important environmental objects. This technique results in more stable frame rates and higher resolution, with no impact on the final image quality." He also promised hardware-accelerated DirectX ray tracing, with "true-to-life lighting, accurate reflections and realistic acoustics in real time." Microsoft also reconfirmed features like SSD storage, which promise faster loading times, as well as new ones, like Quick Resume, for Xbox Series X.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We saw leaked images of the Huawei MatePad Pro 5G last year, looking almost exactly like Apple’s iPad Pro with Smart Keyboard and Apple Pencil. The device has now been launched, and yep, the leaked images were right …

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This would permit the next iPhone to support Apple's rumored augmented reality headset by connecting to a dedicated box via the speedy wireless standard.

Reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said back in September of last year that Apple was working on new mini-LED iPad models, to be launched sometime around the end of 2020, or beginning of 2021.

There’s now corroboration for that report, a supply-chain report claiming that Apple has now placed orders for these after approving earlier samples …

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Between 2011 and 2012, 49-year-old Clifton Collins bought 6,000 Bitcoin using money he earned from growing and selling weed, reports The Irish Times. At the time, the cryptocurrency's price varied between $4 and $6. Today it stands at over $9,700. But Collins isn't enjoying any euphoria for the windfall -- because his landlord threw out his Bitcoin codes. The Irish Times reports that Collins was arrested in 2017 for growing and selling weed, and was subsequently hit with a five-year prison sentence. Following this, his landlord sent many of Collins' possessions to a local dump during the process of clearing out Collins' room. One such item was a fishing rod case, which housed a pice of A4 paper with â53.6 million ($58 million) in Bitcoin codes printed onto it. Cryptocurrency is bought through so-called cryptowallets. Once you buy Bitcoin, the cryptowallet issues you a code that's needed to access it. Anyone who gets that code can access and potentially steal the cryptocurrency, so buyers are usually encouraged to hide their codes somewhere safe. In 2017, Collins spread his 6,000 Bitcoin across 12 accounts in order to guard against losing his crypto-fortune, according to the Times. He printed out the codes to his Bitcoin stash on a piece of A4 paper, the same paper he stuffed into the aforementioned fishing rod case.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's high-end iPad Pro should make a jump from the current LCD panels straight to the superior mini-LED displays that offer many of the OLED benefits while allowing for thinner, lighter designs

iOS 14 may allow users to choose between the current app switcher backs on a deck of app cards and a new iPad-style grid multitasking.

You might want to update macOS and your apps on your own time, when it’s convenient. If so, here’s how to disable automatic software updates on Mac.