When you need external storage for your PC, you might as well go big: Best Buy has dropped the price of WD's 8TB easystore drive to $160.

The last time we saw this deal was early January, and as we acknowledged last time, this drive was cheaper in November during the Black Friday madness. However, this is still a good price. A similar drive sells for $20 more on Amazon right now.

WD's easystore drive features a promised data transfer rate of 5Gbps over USB 3.0, and comes with WD Backup software if you need help figuring out how to backup your PC's files. Otherwise you can use your favorite backup utility such as Windows 10's File History. This drive also has a two-year warranty.

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Updated 01/25/18: Apple has released Beta 2 to developers. The big addition is the Battery health feature on some iPhone models.

Hot on the heels of iOS 11.2.5, which brought HomePod support, Siri news, and a fix for the Messages text bomb, Apple has started to release betas of iOS 11.3. And it’s going to have some pretty cool features on board, including the one we’ve all been waiting for: a toggle for CPU throttling on phones old batteries.

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With less than 72 hours until its release, the first HomePod reviews are in from a hand-picked group of media outlets, and they’re very positive—as long as you’re buying Apple’s $349 smart speaker for sound quality. The Homepod’s “smarts,” though, leave much to be desired.

That’s not a total surprise, since Siri is woefully inadequate on other devices and Apple hadn’t given us any indication that it has enhanced Siri for HomePod. But in action it’s even worse than we expected. Brian X. Chen of The New York Times laments Siri’s capabilities on the new speaker and concludes that “Siri doesn’t even work as well on HomePod as it does on the iPhone.”

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iOS tries to prevent you from installing apps on your iPad and iPhone that won’t run, but sometimes you’re left with cruft—digital vestiges of the past—that persist and make things difficult for you to sort out what’s wrong.

That appears to have happened to Macworld reader Carol, who has an app called Life Cycle installed on her iPad. The update badge is on her App Store icon, but whenever she tries to install the update, she’s told it’s not compatible with iPad. She writes, “Because it won’t update, there’s always the red circle on it indicating that I need to update.”

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Apple is oft criticized for relying so much on the iPhone, as it makes up 70 percent of the company’s revenue. That criticism seems odd, though, considering that even lesser product lines can also spell doom for the company. It’s doom opportunities all the way down.

Writing for CNBC, Keris Lahiff brings us the bad news.

“Apple skeptic says company ‘in trouble’ ahead of HomePod launch.” (Tip o’ the antlers to @designheretic.)

Is that right? Let us look at the company’s quarterly results announced last week:

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We love our AirPods, and if the millions of sales are any indication, you love them, too. But they’re sort of…plain. Plain white case, plain white buds. Fortunately, there’s a whole cottage industry of AirPod accessories to improve the look—and performance—of your wireless headphones. Here are some of the fun and useful ways to beef up your ‘buds.

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According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple is on track to overtake Spotify in U.S. paid subscribers, a sign that the three-year-old music service is making serious inroads in a highly competitive landscape. The report states that Apple Music has been gaining U.S. subscribers at a 3 percent higher clip than Spotify, a trend that would give Apple's music service a higher subscriber rate by the summer, assuming it continues.

But that doesn’t tell the whole story. While it’s hard to know for sure how many subscribers Apple Music has in the U.S., it trails Spotify mightily across the rest of the globe. At last count, Apple had around 36 million subscribers worldwide, compared to Spotify’s 70 million. And that’s with a built-in marketing tool that Spotify doesn’t have: premier placement on the home screen of hundreds of millions of iPhone and iPads sold every year.

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Apple’s operating system recently came under fire from vulnerabilities – both trivial and not – and malware designed to specifically compromise user data and privacy. While macOS users are under the false belief that malware is scarce for Apple’s OS, recent news about the FruitFly malware that’s been around for 13 years has raised new security questions about the likelihood of your Mac getting infected.

One of the most common ways to trick users into installing malware is by rigging popular applications with malicious code. While the Transmission app that delivered ransomware was one of the most noteworthy incidents of 2016 – it was the first time ransomware ever targeted Macs – the Proton app replicated the same attack vector. With more than 1 million downloads, the legitimate Proton app was weaponized with malicious code – in this case, a Remote Access Trojan – to steal data from unsuspecting victims.

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Apple doesn’t often participate in big industry-wide events like CES or E3. The most valuable company in the world holds it own events, thank you very much. Several times a year, Apple invites the press and industry professionals out to a theater to hear all about its latest products and services. Apple calls these “Special Events,” and streams them online to its millions of fans.

There’s also WWDC, Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, a multi-day event in the middle of the year focused on sessions for developers, helping them make the most out of the latest Apple tools and products. It kicks off with a big keynote that serves to announce new products (typically the latest versions of iOS and macOS, as well as a few hardware products).

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The next time you’re editing photos in Lightroom Classic CC, pay attention to how often your gaze darts to the Develop controls at the right edge of the screen. Nearly every adjustment is a slider, so it’s like watching a tennis match: move the mouse pointer to a specific control, change the value, look back at the image to see the effect you made, repeat hundreds of times.

What if you could retrain your muscle memory and keep your eyes on the photo? The Loupedeck is a physical control panel, roughly the size of a keyboard, studded with dials and buttons that correspond to Lightroom controls. It plugs into a Mac or PC via USB, and works with Lightroom Classic CC and Lightroom 6 under macOS 10.10 and later and Windows 7 and later; it’s not compatible with the Lightroom CC application introduced in late 2017.

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Let’s face it, the iPhone X is a huge problem! It’s obvious! People are saying it, so it must be true. The only question is how to fix the problem. Luckily, internet talky people are here to tell Apple how. Thank God. Finally someone is giving Apple some free advice.

Writing for Fortune, Mohanbir Sawhney has the goods.

“Here’s Where Apple Went Wrong With the iPhone X.” (Tip o’ the antlers to mylestaylor.)

Oh, good, we’re finally going to get to the bottom of this. OK, sit down everyone. Shh. Quiet. OK, go ahead Mohanbir.

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Update 02/02/18: Refurbished Apple TV 4K units are now available for sale, for $30 less than the original price.

Looking for a way to save some money on the latest Apple products? Consider a refurbished MacBook, refurbished iPhone, or refurbished iPad from the Apple Certified Refurbished store. A refurbished product is just like a new, but at a lower price. Apple just added the 10.5-inch iPad Pro to its refurbished store, so if you're in the market for one, you can save a tidy sum.

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NordVPN promises a private and fast path through the public internet, with no logs and unmetered access for 6 simultaneous devices. They are currently running a promotion, but you'll have to use this link to find it. Its typical price has been discounted to $99 for 3 years of service. That's a good deal at just $2.75 per month.  See the $2.75/month NordVPN holiday deal here.

The tech sector is thriving, and demand is high for those proficient in coding, web design, and other highly-regarded digital skills. Now, going to a four-year university is one way to acquire this know-how, but Stone River eLearning offers an alternative pathway for a fraction of the time and cost. Plus, you can sign up for a lifetime membership for over 90% off the usual price for a limited time.

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When it comes to turn-based strategy games, you'd be hard-pressed to find a series as venerable and decorated as Sid Meier's Civilization. And now the Mac and Linux versions of the latest installment are 50% off the usual price.

The turn-based strategy franchise has sold over 35 million units worldwide since its creation and generated a massive community of players attempting to build an empire to stand the test of time.

Winner of 15 E3 Awards, including Best PC Game and Best Strategy Game, Sid Meier's Civilization VI has you advance your civilization from the Stone Age to the Information Age by waging war, conducting diplomacy, advancing your culture, and going head to head with history's greatest leaders.

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Apple may have embraced the pro market on the Mac hardware side with the recent release of the iMac Pro and forthcoming Mac Pro, but the software side, well, that’s a slightly different story.

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Three months ago, Apple boldly asserted that the holiday quarter of 2017, its first financial quarter of this fiscal year, would be the company’s biggest in history. They weren’t wrong. In fact, Apple’s holiday quarter generated $88.3 billion in revenue, blowing past even the high side of Apple’s estimates.

By just about any way you measure it, this was a great quarter for Apple. But of course, the devil’s in the details, whether it’s line items in the corporate reports or in tidbits revealed during the company’s regular phone call with analysts. So here’s a look at four tidbits we learned about Apple’s big quarter.

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If iPhone X is slumping, it’s sure not affecting Apple’s bottom line. In the quarter ending December 31, 2017, Apple reported a record revenue of $88.3 billion, a 13 percent increase over last year’s $78.4 billion (which was also a record). Additionally, Apple posted an all-time record quarterly earnings per diluted share of $3.89. And that's with one less week of sales over last year's first quarter.

Leading the way was the iPhone, but not due to unit sales. Apple moved 77.3 million iPhones in the three-month holiday quarter, about a million less than last year, but revenue grew by more than $7 billion to $61.6 billion. While Apple didn’t break out the different models of iPhone, it’s clear that the higher price of iPhone X contributed to the gains. Tim Cook said the newly redesigned handset “surpassed our expectations and has been our top-selling iPhone every week since it shipped in November.”

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If you need a 4K-compatible streaming device, Amazon, Staples, Best Buy, and Target have the 4K Fire TV on sale for $55 right now. That's about 21 percent off the usual price, and close to the all-time low of $50.

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