Brand: MacNews

Apple says its Board of Directors has authorized an increase of more than 50% to the company’s program to return capital to shareholders. Under the expanded program, Apple plans to utilize a cumulative total of US$200 billion of cash by the end of March 2017. 

As part of the revised program, the Board has increased its share repurchase authorization to $140 billion from the $90 billion level announced last year. In addition, the company expects to continue to net-share-settle vesting restricted stock units.

Apple has announced the financial results for its fiscal 2015 second quarter that ended March 28. The company posted quarterly revenue of US$58 billion and quarterly net profit of $13.6 billion, or $2.33 per diluted share.

Anawiki Games (http://www.anawiki.com) has announced Avalon Legends Solitaire 2 for Mac OS X (10.6.5 or higher). It costs US$9.97.

Cindori AB (http://tinyurl.com/obyclqf) has released Disk Sensei, a disk performance tool for Mac OS X.

It can monitor, maintain and enhance storage performance and utilization. Disk Sensei lets you: monitor drive usage and statistics; analyze drive health; visualize drive content to help understand and maintain your file system; clean out space-hogging caches, logs and other large files; optimize drive performance and free up space through advanced OS X tweaks; enable Trim for Solid State Drives; and benchmark drives and compare their performance.

Griffin Technology has released the US$29.99 WatchStand (store.griffintechnology.com/watchstand), a dock that provides a place to charge and display the Apple Watch.

The WatchStand displays the Apple smartwatch on a sleek pedestal, and can be placed on any nightstand, tabletop or desktop for daily charging. It houses the Apple-provided magnetic charging cable in an angled cradle that keeps it ready to charge at all times.