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The tech world is completely aghast at the price of the gold Apple Watch Edition, which starts at $10,000 but is more likely to set buyers back $17,000 (plus tax!).

The pricing is baking everyone’s noodles. We can’t wrap our heads around a super-expensive watch that will soon be obsolete and is functionally identical to a $350 model. This is not how tech works.

But that’s the point. I wrote how the high-end Apple Watch winds me up — I argued that its very existence is antithetical to Apple’s democratic values. But after further research, it’s obvious that Apple knows exactly what it’s doing, and it’s very smart — even if I still don’t like the gold watch’s enormous price tag.

The Apple Watch Edition is a classic Veblen product. The outrageous price is the whole point. And the higher it gets, the more of them Apple will sell. It might even be priced too low.

Actress Anna Kendrick can probably afford a $10,000 gold watch, but that didn’t stop her from taking a bite out of Apple after it flexed its wrist-computing power Monday.

Known for her brutal Twitter truths, Kendrick offered a sour evaluation of the high-end Apple Watch, which is made of 18-karat gold and comes with a matching luxury price tag.

“We should be thanking Apple for launching the $10,000 ‘apple watch’ as the new gold standard in douchebag detection,” wrote Kendrick.

The new MacBook is one of the most impressive pieces of technology Apple has unleashed in five years. It boasts a Retina display, USB-C, butterfly-hinged keyboard, Force Touch trackpad and terraced batteries. All crammed inside a body that’s smaller than the MacBook Air, made possible by a new fanless processor.

Despite being an unapologetically gorgeous piece of hardware, the new MacBook’s biggest weapon — the fanless processor — is also its greatest weakness.

Apple has placed the new MacBook in a category most people shouldn’t even consider buying, and that’s OK. The new MacBook isn’t for you and me, it’s for the future.

The Apple Watch is a watch in as much as the iPhone is a phone: It bears a resemblance to its titular device, but does so much more as well. That said, Apple’s focus on inviting fashion and watch journalists to yesterday’s “Spring Forward” keynote shows that Cupertino does view its new wearable device as an alternative to analog watches.

Now that we finally have a price tag for all the Apple Watch models, we can compare a few classic alternatives you could strap on your wrist instead. You won’t get the apps, or the ability to beam your heartbeat to a loved one, but if it’s a stylish status symbol you’re after, these are the timepieces the Apple Watch needs to beat.

Check out our picks to see if Jony Ive’s proclamation that Swiss watchmakers are “f*cked” is really true.

When Steve jobs co-founded Apple, his vision was to democratize technology.

At the time, computers were for governments and rich corporations. Jobs wanted everyone to have their own computer — a crazy idea back in the ’70s. The slogan for the original Macintosh was “the computer for the rest of us.”

For the next 30 years, Jobs worked hard to realize that mission. Although Apple has never made the cheapest computers, in general, the trend has been cheaper and more accessible, from the Mac to the iPhone. For most people, Apple’s products are largely affordable.

This is why the gold Apple Watch Edition — which starts at $10,000 — bugs me. It’s not a watch for the rest of us. It’s a watch for everyone but us. It’s a watch for the one percent.

Apple blew us away today with its HBO Now partnership, sexy new MacBook, and ResearchKit. But the star of the show was Apple Watch, which has the potential to be either a game changer or massive flop.

For those who don’t remember, this was the second time Apple execs have taken the stage to talk Apple Watch. We got an initial preview of the Watch back in September, and today’s event was more for filling in the knowledge gaps.

While we already knew the Watch’s main selling points and the kinds of apps it would run, there was still some crucial information that needed answering. Luckily Apple did address the most important questions, but it also left certain aspects of the Watch in ambiguity.

What will make or break the Apple Watch for most people isn’t a fancy band or the feel of the Digital Crown. It will be the apps they can use.

And after today’s Spring Forward event, it looks like a lot of apps will be ready for Watch on day one.

There won’t be an App Store on the Watch itself, but you’ll be able to install apps directly from a special section of the App Store on a paired iPhone. Here are what the hottest third-party Watch apps will look like, including ones Apple isn’t showing off on its site:

Aside from the gorgeous new 12-inch MacBook Air, the part of today’s Apple keynote that excited me the most was the announcement of what Apple is calling ResearchKit, a new open-source iOS software framework designed to crowdsource volunteers for medical research studies.

Using the tool, researchers can tap into Apple’s massive iPhone user base to recruit people for medical data-gathering. Users sign up with a digital signature, and can then instantly begin recording data.

The biggest surprise about today’s big Apple Watch event? That Cupertino’s upcoming wearable didn’t really steal the show.

We got a few new details about the smartwatch, but Tim Cook and crew really blew our minds with several other big announcements. Here are the most important revelations from the show at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

If Jony Ive sometimes missed out on getting his rightful credit while Steve Jobs was steering the ship at Apple, that same accusation can’t be made today. Following on from the recent superb New Yorker profile about Ive and the Apple Watch, Apple’s superstar design guru is the recipient of another profile (complete with interview), this time with the Financial Times.

The story’s not nearly as in-depth as the 10,000-word New Yorker piece, but it still has a few interesting observations about Ive’s approach to technology and the unique design challenges of working on the Apple Watch — including why the Apple Watch was a very different prospect for Ive than working on the iPhone.

Highlights can be found after the jump.

SAN FRANCISCO — Whether they’re in town to pitch products, apply for jobs or ponder the next big thing, the Game Developers Conference is an annual rite of passage for gaming geeks of all sizes, shapes and economic persuasions.

More than 24,000 game developers, publishers and journalists cram into Moscone Center for a weeklong dive into the latest gaming trends. In between panels like “Adventures of a Video Game Drag Queen,” “How Players Engage with Morality” and “Designing for Mobile VR in Dead Secret,” they mix and mingle — at least the ones who don’t have VR goggles strapped to their heads.

Here’s a taste of the action on the ground.

In the summer of 1991, Sonic the Hedgehog was, quite simply, the greatest thing Simon Thomley had ever seen.

At the age of 11, Thomley had graduated to the SEGA Genesis gaming console after years as a Nintendo Entertainment System player. Sonic had lured him to SEGA’s system, and he wasn’t alone: The spiny blue speedster captured the hearts of gamers everywhere. By the end of the year, SEGA had sped past Nintendo on console sales.

A series of sequels followed. While many people remember the Sonic games primarily as a relic of the ’90s, they become an unlikely career for Thomley and his developer friend Christian Whitehead. Better known as Stealth and Taxman, they brought remastered versions of classic Sonic games to iOS for a new generation of gamers to enjoy.

“This has always been my hobby, but I’m lucky enough that this has now become my full-time job,” Thomley tells Cult of Mac. The pair brought finely tuned official versions of Sonic games to iOS — although recent turmoil at SEGA has thrown the future of their highly regarded work into doubt.

Even in the wake of an uber-popular device like the iPhone 6, which sold upward of 10 million units in its first weekend alone, it’s fascinating to see analysts hedging their bets when it comes to the Apple Watch. The spread of predictions from these professional prognosticators might as well have been generated at random.

The latest group to weigh in is Strategy Analytics, which is predicting that the Apple Watch will sell (or at least ship) 15.4 million units worldwide in 2015, which would still make Cupertino the world’s No. 1 smartwatch vendor, but with a much smaller market share than others are predicting.

How do you make Apple Watch apps without access to the actual device?

For many developers, it doesn’t get better than the simulation tools Apple provides and some cardboard cutouts. But for a select few, Apple has given the opportunity to test the unreleased Watch in person at a top secret lab.

Apple’s March 9 “Spring Forward” event is just around the corner, and its tagline can only mean one thing: Apple Watch news galore.

Scheduled for the day after daylight saving time kicks in, we expect Apple to shower us with details about the upcoming wearable, including pricing and availability. Select Apple Watch apps from App Store developers will likely be shown off as well to whet our appetites for what’s to come.

While there’s a chance some new Mac hardware could share the stage Monday, we expect the event to focus mostly on all the unanswered questions surrounding the Apple Watch.

What are those questions? Glad you asked:

SAN FRANCISCO — Crossy Road developers Andy Sum and Matt Hall never set out to rake in a pile of cash. They did, however, want to create a popular game.

“We wanted to make the next Flappy Bird,” said Sum at the duo’s Game Developers Conference session here Tuesday.

“But our goal wasn’t to make money,” added Hall.

And yet make money they did. While Crossy Road hasn’t hit Flappy Bird levels of success (or notoriety), it pulled in 50 million downloads — on iOS, Android and Amazon — during the game’s first 90 days. It also generated $10 million for Hipster Whale, Sum and Hall’s development company.

Not bad for a game that was originally named Roadkill Simulator 2014.

Apple will reveal pricing details on its long-anticipated smartwatch in less than a week, but if the stainless steel version costs upward of $700, I’m definitely going the cheap route with the Apple Watch Sport.

The $350 timepiece isn’t as fashionable as its expensive gold and stainless-steel siblings, a point Apple’s website emphasizes by only showing Sport units with Sport bands. But if you pair the Sport with pricier bands, you can barely tells its the el cheapo option.

iOS developer Nick McCardel created mockups of the Apple Watch Sport with bands for the Apple Watch and Apple Watch Edition. Despite its less luxe finish, the Sport’s silver and space gray aluminum cases still look great no matter what you pair them with.

Take a look at some of the configurations below:

Salavat Fidai is working proof that artists need not create large pieces to make a name for themselves.

Much of what he creates is no bigger than the tip of a pencil — literally.

Under the glow of a single work light while his family sleeps, Fidai uses a craft knife and 4x magnifying glass to create tiny sculptures out of pointy pencil lead.

The Apple Watch isn’t even out yet, and already it’s picking up major design awards. The award in question here is the prestigious 2015 iF Design Gold Award, a prize sometimes referred to as a “Design Oscar.”

The awards were first introduced in 1954, and attract more than 2,000 product entries from 37 different nations — with expert judges ruling based on outstanding design quality.

Whether Apple is actually building a car, or it’s just a controlled leak to show that the company has more planned after the Apple Watch, isn’t known yet. What is sure, though, is that Apple is now legally covered if it wants to slap its name and logo onto an automobile.

Using its regular law firm Baker & McKenzie in Zurich, Apple recently expanded its corporate description to not just include the current array of watches, smartphones, tablets and computers, but vehicles, too. And Apple’s lawyers aren’t taking any chances, either. Apple aircraft, anyone?

Apple’s new ad campaign might be its best yet, especially if you’re one of the iPhone owners that’s about to have your photo on a billboard.

Simply called “Shot on iPhone,” it’s hard to call Apple’s campaign an ad at all — at least in the traditional sense. Apple crowdsourced photos shot with the iPhone by normal people around the world, and the result is a testament to just how incredible iPhone photography has become.

During his whirlwind tour of the Middle East and Europe, Apple CEO Tim Cook has been leaving little breadcrumbs of Apple Watch revelations.

There was the confirmation that the Watch will be showerproof in Germany, and now Cook has said it will eventually replace your car keys.

République Remastered is the gorgeously rebooted Mac and PC version of Seattle-based Camoflaj’s intriguing episodic stealth video game that originally came out for iPad and iPhone in December of 2013.

The development team took the opportunity to completely revamp the game within the updated game engine, Unity, moving the entire project from Unity 4 to Unity 5. By making this the first game release ever with the Unity 5 engine, they got early access to the engine in return for documenting their process.

“When Unity 5 was announced we saw our chance to make good on our two-year old promise to make a PC and Mac version of République,” writes the team on the Unity blog. “In addition to spending months completely reworking the game’s controls and UI, we knew we’d benefit from an increased wow factor on this new platform. From our dumpy office in downtown Bellevue (surrounded by industry titans like Bungie and Valve), we’ve put our heart and soul into this ambitious and at times, difficult, project.”

Check out the official game trailer below to see how they succeeded in making this already stunning game even more gorgeous.

Valery Rozov is running out of mountains off which to jump.

The Red-Bull-pedaling daredevil added Mount Kilimanjaro to a recent jump in a wingsuit, traveling a horizontal distance of nearly two miles in a minute-long free fall before pulling his parachute to safely land at Barranco Camp. He was greeted by several Africans, who hoisted him on their shoulders.

“The locals had heard what I was up to and were pretty impressed,” Rozov, 50, told redbull.com.

If you plan on seeing Focus starring Will Smith and Margot Robbie this weekend, you will be watching the first major studio film edited entirely with Final Cut Pro X.

Originally criticized as “iMovie Pro” for its incredibly simplistic interface and feature set, Final Cut Pro X has managed to start wooing Hollywood filmmakers by slowly adding back missed tools along with new ones. Now the directors behind Focus think it’s the future of movie editing.