PCR Tech and IT retail, distribution and vendor news
Five for Friday is a weekly feature to give a brief roundup of our top five stories from the week that you might have missed. Think we left anything out? Let us know your favourite stories of the week by pinging us a tweet @pcr_online.
Google agrees to comply with EC antitrust order
Google is set to change its price comparision service in light of an anti trust decision made earlier this summer, a spokesperson for the European Commission (EC) has confirmed. The company has until September to rectify its practice, or else it will recieve daily fines.
In June, Google was hit with a record €2.42 billion (£2.1 billion) fine after it emerged that it had been manipulating search results in order to promote its own shopping comparison service. The fine came after a a probe by the EC that had been investigating Google Shopping since late 2010.
Will consumers pay $999 for the iPhone 8?
Last week Samsung unveiled its Galaxy Note 8 with a starting price of £869. Apple is set to unveil its latest iPhone later this week and if the rumours are to be believed, it could be the most expensive smart phone yet. Expected to cost $999 in the US and even more in the UK, consumers look like they are going to have to get used to forking out small fortunes if they want to have the latest devices.
To put it into context, for around the same amount of money you could buy yourself a MacBook Air. The thought of paying the same amount for a phone as a laptop was previously unthinkable. And there are plenty of other decent laptops on the market that retail at a lesser price than top-end phones.
With the cost of phones rising and manufacturers testing the limits of consumer tolerance, it begs the question: will people continue paying the high prices and what is the glass ceiling for smartphone device prices?
AMD to pay shareholders $30 million to make Llano lawsuit disappear
AMD has agreed to fork out $29.5 million to end a legal battle with its shareholders. The chipmaker told a US court that it had reached an agreement with its shareholders after they accused the company of misleading them in the build up to the disastrous Llano chip launch in 2011. The judge is likely to approve the deal in the coming days, ending years of legal wrangling between the two sides.
The suit was first filed in 2014, representing anyone who had bought AMD shares between April 4 2011 and October 18 2012. The group of shareholders claimed that AMD violated federal securities by misleading investors on the progress of the 32nm Llano chip.
Can Amazon do more to protect customers?
Online retail giant Amazon is at the centre of an unusual lawsuit based around eclipse glasses.
South Carolina residents Kayla Harris and fiancée Corey Payne purchased a three-pack of eclipse glasses early this month, believing that they’d do the trick for letting the pair safely view the eclipse. However, the couple were left reeling from dodgy glasses and suffered headaches and eye-watering and, at a later date, vision impairment.
The retailer had, on August 10th, issued a recall of glasses it was unable to verify as safe, emailing customers to return their units. The couple in question however claim that they did not recieve an email, and say that they are aiming to represent other people who suffered as a result of suspect eclipse glasses.
CeX suffers online security breach
Retailer CeX has suffered an online security breach. In an email to customers on Wednesday morning, the retailer said it was investigating the breach "as a priority" and promised it was "taking a number of measures to prevent this from happening again."
According to the email from managing director David Mullins, the breach was a result of an unauthorised third party accessing CeX’s computer systems. Consequently, CeX believes that "some customer data has been compromised" including personal information such as first names, surnames, addresses, email addresses and phone numbers if they were supplied.
