Apple to sell heavily discounted products in another ‘Lucky Bag’ promotion on Jan. 2

By Jason Hahn December 28, 2014

Apple store Japan

On Jan. 2, 8 a.m. local time in Japan, Apple will continue to follow the Japanese tradition of fukubukuro (“lucky bag”), where brick-and-mortar retail stores sell bags filled with unknown items sold at heavy discounts. This is great news for shoppers in Japan; for the rest of us, it’s time yet again to get a little jealous.

Last year, shoppers in Japan were able to pay about $345 to get one of four variations of the Apple Lucky Bag containing items such as the iPod nano, iPad Air and MacBook Air. Each variation of the Lucky Bag was different, but all of them contained a commemorative T-shirt, backpack and Mophie Juice Pack Powerstation Mini.

The Beats by Dre Pill Bluetooth speaker, Apple Magic Mouse, Nike+ FuelBand SE, Square Reader and JayBird BlueBuds X headphones were among the other items included in the four versions of last year’s Apple Lucky Bag.

Not everyone who waits in line for an Apple Lucky Bag gets exactly what he or she hopes for, though everyone gets plenty of bang for their yen. Pricing for 2015’s Apple Lucky Bag has not been announced.

According to Apple’s Lucky Bag purchase policy page, these bags will be available for purchase only at Apple retail stores in Japan. The page also makes it clear that the limit is one Lucky Bag per shopper; pricing is non-negotiable; and items in the Lucky Bag are not eligible for return, refund or exchange (unless there’s a defect in the product).

[Image courtesy of Filipe Frazao/Shutterstock]

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Contributor

Jason Hahn is a part-time freelance writer based in New Jersey. He earned his master's degree in journalism at Northwestern…

Computing

Apple says developers shouldn’t need a separate Mac team, thanks to Catalyst

13 inch apple macbook pro touch bar 128gb amazon deal review 1 768x768

Apple's Catalyst program is now in full swing, bringing your favorite iPad apps to MacOS. Todd Benjamin, MacOS product marketing director, provided an update, saying Mac owners will benefit from a whole new app selection pulled from the iPad ecosystem.

Apple first teased Mac Catalyst during its WWDC conference in 2018 followed by a full-blown reveal during the following annual conference. It enables developers to easily port their apps from the iPad to MacOS, resulting in the Mac App Store's new section labeled Apps You Love, Now On Mac, shown below.

Mobile

Apple’s AR headset tipped for 2020, following iPhone SE 2 and new iPad Pros

apple iphone se tops annual customer satisfaction index 004

Ming-Chi Kuo, the most accurate and prolific Apple analyst, has another hot tip for us. This time around, it looks like Apple’s iPhone SE 2 will launch in the first quarter of 2020 and the company’s long-rumored augmented reality headset is being prepped for launch in the second quarter of the same year, according to excerpts of a Chinese-language report translated to English.

That’s coming upon us quite quickly, especially considering the years of anticipation, rumors, and speculation following the 2016 release of Apple’s smaller, least-expensive iPhone option, the iPhone SE. As we reported earlier this month, Kuo indicates that the new SE will have a form much like the iPhone 8, 3GB RAM, and starting storage capacity of 32GB. Pricing, unfortunately, is not among the details.

Computing

Hackers are pretending to be cybersecurity firm to lock your entire PC

A hacker typing on an Apple MacBook laptop while holding a phone. Both devices show code on their screens.

As hackers come up with new ways to attack, not even trustworthy names can be taken at face value. This time, a ransom-as-a-service (RaaS) attack is being used to impersonate a cybersecurity vendor called Sophos.

The RaaS, referred to as SophosEncrypt, can take hold of your files -- or even your whole PC -- and requires payment to have them decrypted.