News

For the fifth consecutive Friday Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) closed the week at a record high. The share price reached $116.47 by Friday's closing bell. High demand for the iPhone 6 and great expectations for both holiday sales and the Apple Watch launch prompted several investment firms to raise their target prices last week. On Thursday, Morgan Stanley analyst Katie Huberty raised her target price to $126 after Apple surpassed her previous target of $115. She believes people are underestimating potential Apple Watch sales.

Evercore went a bit further and raised its target price from $125 to $136 on Thursday, while Piper Jaffray raised its from $120 to $135. RBC Capital raised its target from $115 to $120 on Monday. All three firms see strong holiday sales and a successful Apple Watch launch in early 2015.

Apple officially released iOS 8.1.1 last week. The update improves performance on older hardware like the iPhone 4s and iPad 2, but it also patches some of the exploits used by Pangu's jailbreak.

Pangu, however, is working on an iOS 8.1.1 jailbreak, and currently has one that works on 30-pin devices (which predates the lightning connector). The team demoed it on an iPad 3.

All you need to know this week is that Five Nights at Freddy's 2 and Kingdom Rush Origins are both now available on the App Store. Five Nights and Origins are currently the top two games on Apple's Top Paid Apps Chart and followups to two of our favorite games of the year. You can read our review of the original Five Nights at Freddy's here, and why Kingdom Rush is currently our favorite tower defense series here.

In other news, Apple ditched the "Free" button in the App Store, Disney Interactive announced Disney Infinity 2.0 would be available for both the iPhone and iPad this December and Telltale unveiled House Forrester -- the banner clan who will be the focus of the new Game of Thrones episodic video game series.

Most of the Free buttons in the App Store have recently been changed to Get. Apple has quietly modified this feature of the App Store across all platforms. The move follows better delineation of apps that include In-App Purchases, which are often referred to as Freemium apps. Get may better describe the action of downloading, and avoid descriptions of what's actually free.

The Free buttons haven't entirely disappeared, however. Apple apps such as iMovie, Pages, Keynote, and Numbers are marked Free, presumably because they will never offer In-App Purchases. In contrast, third-party apps that do not offer In-App Purchases are still marked with the Get button.

The latest version of iOS has been jailbroken untethered, and demonstrated on an iPad 3. Developer iH8sn0w posted a video demonstrating the iOS 8.1.1 jailbreak only days after the firmware's release. In the update, Apple closed three of the exploits used by Pangu Team to jailbreak iOS 8.1.

While the iOS 8.1.1 jailbreak is a sign of progress, it currently only works on 30-pin devices which predate the Lighting connector. The news comes as Apple has already seeded iOS 8.2 to developers. At this point in time, the best bet for those looking to jailbreak is to move forward with the Pangu jailbreak on iOS 8.1. Apple is likely to stop signing the iOS 8.1 firmware any day now.